Maud becomes the center of his vision of divine beauty He expresses his deep emotional fear and tender respect through the following line Tread softly because you tread on my dreams Proud and Destructive Heroine In No Second Troy Maud Gonne is shown as noble proud and dangerous Yeats asks Why should I blame her that she filled my days with misery This shows his personal pain Yet he cannot hate her He compares her to Helen of Troy whose beauty caused war Her beauty like a tightened bow means both charm and destruction She is high and solitary and most stern living like a heroic figure from an ancient time Yeats admires her courage and purity but fears her power To him Maud is like fire bright and strong but painful to touch Memory and Idealization In Among School Children Yeats meets young students and remembers Maud s youth He imagines her as a child that Ledaean body bent above a sinking fire The word Ledaean links her to myth like Helen of Troy again He sees her as both woman and symbol Through memory he joins her beauty with ideas of time and art When he sees the children he wonders if Maud once stood like them The poem ends with a question How can we know the dancer from the dance This line showing that Maud s image and Yeats s art are now one Source of Inspiration and Suffering Maud Gonne inspired Yeats s highest art but also gave him sorrow She refused his marriage proposals many times Yet he never stopped loving her His poems show both worship and heartbreak Her rejection made his poetry deeper and more spiritual She becomes the symbol of unfulfilled desire In his verses love turns into art and pain turns into beauty His imagination finds meaning in loss Blend of Love Politics and Myth Maud Gonne was also a revolutionary In No Second Troy Yeats connects her political passion with her beauty Her spirit taught to ignorant men most violent ways He admires her courage but dislikes her violence She stands between political fire and poetic grace To express her power Yeats uses Greek myth and Irish legend She becomes both a national symbol and a personal dream Thus Yeats combines love myth and politics into a single poetic image of Maud Gonne In Yeats s poetry Maud Gonne is not just a woman She is beauty a dream and a destiny He presents her as a goddess muse and memory She gives light to his art and pain to his heart Through her Yeats connects love with imagination and history with myth