Love poetry, the discourse of sexuality in verse, is inflected by the gender of the subject position adopted by its author. In this respect Yeats's work is problematic. As an Irish nationalist poet he was expected to produce "manly" verse in order to counteract the colonial stero-type of the Irish as effeminate and childish. Yet he conceived of his poetic vocation as demanding a "feminine" receptivity and passivity, and as inheritor of an organic romantic poetic he saw the production of verse as analogous to the female labor of producing a child. "Man is a woman to his work, and it begets his thought," he wrote in 1909 [Memoirs: Autobiography—First Draft and Journal]. Gilbert and Gubar argue that in the nineteenth century literary creativity was metaphorically defined as a male generative activity: pen as penis, author as father; but Mary Ellmann [in Thinking] notes an equally strong association between "childbirth and the male mind." The organic childbirth metaphor, discarded by neo-classical poets, was revivified by the Romantics. In 1911 Gonne, employing a bold gender-role reversal, deplored Yeats's absorption in theater to the detriment of love poetry:

Our children were your poems of which I was the Father sowing the unrest & storm which made them possible & you the mother who brought them forth in suffering & in the highest beauty & our children had wings—You & Lady Gregory have a child also the theatre company & Lady Gregory is the Father who holds you to your duty of motherhood in true marriage style. That child requires much feeding & looking after. I am sometimes jealous for my children. [Always Your Friend: Letters between Maud Gonne and W. B. Yeats, 1893-1938]

"That the Night Come" shows that Yeats accepted both Gonne's masculine self-definition and her metaphors: in the "storm and strife" of her existence she resembles "a king" [The Variorum Edition of the Poems]. Susan Friedman argues, however, that male poets who adopt the female model of pregnancy are indulging in "a form of literary couvade, male appropriation of procreative labor to which women have been confined" [in "Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse." Feminist studies 1987]: the comparison between poetic and physical creativity, which masks women's inability to participate in cultural labor, keeps them at the work of producing babies. Nevertheless, Gonne's version of the trope, with its confident adoption of the active, stormy, and paternal role, and its comic depiction of Yeats as the submissive wife of a dominating Gregory, suggests that the use of this metaphor during the period of women's emancipation may signify a shift in power rather than an appropriative strategy. Yeats's encouragement and promotion of women artists such as Katharine Tynan, Florence Farr, Althea Gyles, Augusta Gregory, Dorothy Wellesley, and Margot Ruddock, moreover, allow us to interpret his use of the childbirth metaphor as sympathetic identification rather than usurpation. As a comrade he exhorted Wellesley: "Write verse, my dear, go on writing, that is the only thing that matters" [The Letters, 1954].

Yeats was fascinated by William Sharp's attempt to reinvent himself as the Celtic poetess Fiona MacLeod; and Freudian and Jungian critics concur in describing him as female identified, [see Brenda Webster's Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study] While the Freudians regard this iden tification as a problem, a neurosis caused by his unsatisfactory relationship with his mother [See David Lynch's Yeats; The Poetics of the Self], Kiberd uses the Jungian model to argue that, although in his youth Yeats was "an unconscious slave to his anima," he later accepted and expressed the woman within. [See Declan Kiberd's Men and Feminism in Modern Literature]. His insistence on the androgyny of the male artist is characteristic of the Decadence, a period during which, Jane Marcus argues [in Art and Anger: Reading Like a Women], the concept of androgyny "extends the range of male sexuality into the feminine, but continues to regard the extension of female sexuality into the historical masculine as perverse." Womanly men were more acceptable than mannish women. Androgyny has been condemned by feminists on the grounds that to celebrate the combination of stereotypically "masculine" and "feminine" qualities is to presume that aggression is naturally male, and passivity naturally female, and to advocate with Jung that men seek an eternal woman, women an eternal man, within themselves. Jungian formulations superimpose two essentialist stereotypes rather than revealing gender identity as a social construction. Diana Fuss [in Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference], however, claims convincingly that essentialism is neither good nor bad in itself, but as it is deployed, while Carolyn Heilbrun [in Toward a Recognition of Androgyny] insists that androgyny means the deconstruction of stereotypes, "a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender." If we grant that for some writers the goal of androgyny was the freedom to be active or passive or a mixture of the two regardless of biology, Heilburn's contention may be acceptable Ashis Nandy claims that in India the denigration of klibatva, or femininity-in-masculinity, as the "final negation of a man's political identity, a pathology more dangerous than femininity itself," was part of the disastrous legacy of colonialism. Indians became convinced that to fight the aggressive, controlling, and powerful oppressor it was necessary to adopt his standards of "masculinity," and thus created an absolute sexual polarization not native to Hindu culture. Contemporary objections to Jung and to the concept of androgyny should not lead to the dismissal of an idea that challenged the dominant constructions of gender during Yeats's lifetime. Yeats once argued that, "In judging any moment of past time we should leave out what has since happened" [Explorations]. We cannot do that, but as historicists we should balance contemporary theoretical questions with the solutions that were intellectually possible and politically useful at a specific moment in history.

Like many Romantic poets, Yeats was unable to identify with the norms of masculinity dominant in the late nineteenth century. He exalted emotion over reason. He loathed the Victorian myth of science and progress; and his early desire to cast out of his verse "those energetic rhythms, as of a man running" and replace them by "wavering, meditative, organic rhythms" [Essays and Introductions] demonstrates his rejection of masculine form. He espoused an organic, Keatsian, consciously essentialist "feminine" poetics in which "words are as subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman." His horoscope showed him to be a man dominated by the moon, and in his later years he developed a philosophy based upon a lunar myth that privileged traditionally feminine symbolism: moon over sun, night over day. Although his father praised active men, Yeats was timid and passive, dependent upon reverie and dreams for his inspiration. While the autonomous, unified phallic self of patriarchal tradition claims sole authorship both of history and literary texts, Yeats, whose most aggressively phallic symbol, the tower, is "Half dead at the top," subverted the potency of this imperial maleness; despite his post-1903 Nietzschean posturings, it was always an ironic mask. He described himself as "one that ruffled in a manly pose / For all his timid heart." His dialogical theory of the gyres, in which opposites alternately increase and decrease in strength but contain and never obliterate each other, reveals his rejection of a unitary position.

At the beginning of his career Yeats was metaphorically ravished by a Muse who displayed the traditionally masculine qualities of aggression and initiation. Laura Armstrong, whom he described as a "wild creature" [Autobiographies], "woke me from the metallic sleep of science and set me writing my first play." Although Armstrong played a conventionally feminine role in rescuing Yeats from the "metallic" sterility of rational and scientific thought and turning him toward the intuitive world of poetry, Yeats's portrait of himself as a Sleeping Prince awakened by an energetic Princess reverses gender stereotypes. His account of their first meeting emphasizes his passivity:

I was climbing up a hill at Howth when I heard wheels behind me and a pony-carriage drew up beside me. A pretty girl was driving alone and without a hat. She told me her name and said we had friends in common and asked me to ride beside her. After that I saw a great deal of her and was soon in love. I did not tell her I was in love, however, because she was engaged. She had chosen me for her confidant and I learned all about her quarrels with her lover.

Armstrong, unconventionally hatless and driving alone, literally carried off the poet, who became the passive listener to her tales of love.

The Island of Statues, written for Armstrong, explores numerous ambiguities of gender. An Enchantress lives on an island, guarding the flower of immortality within a "brazen-gated glade." Penetration of this symbolically feminine enclosure is archetypally dangerous: male questers in search of the flower must be certain to choose correctly; if they fail, the Medusan Enchantress will turn them to stone. The plucking of a flower is an ancient metaphor for the taking of virginity, and we hardly need Freud's interpretation of the Medusa as the castrating female genitals surrounded by snaky hair to see in The Island of Statues a thinly veiled expression of Yeats's doubts about his ability to conform to traditional standards of masculine behavior. Indeed, the impotence of all the male characters in the play is striking. The lovers of the shepherdess Naschina, Thernot and Colin, are the first of Yeats's passive poets mesmerized by inaccessible and courageous females: Aillil in early versions of The Shadowy Waters, Septimus in the drafts of The Player Queen, Aleel in The Countess Cathleen. (Aleel was a Yeatsian self-portrait written to be played by a woman, Farr.) Naschina favors Almintor, an ostensibly more heroic type. Yeats, however, could not yet create a successful masculine male: Almintor chooses the wrong flower and is duly turned to stone. The resourceful Naschina assumes a male disguise and confronts the Enchantress. In a Shakespearian denouement, the Enchantress falls in love with the disguised shepherdess; but her infatuation destroys her, and Naschina restores the statues to life. Like Rosalind, Portia, and Viola, the androgynous female in male clothing unites the best qualities of both sexes. Yet while Shakespeare's transvestite heroines are reincorporated into conventional patriarchal society at the close of the action, Naschina's success transforms her into a figure of the excluded Eternal Feminine: at the end of the play, unlike her lover, she casts no shadow. A resourceful woman becomes Symbolic Woman. To add to the indeterminacy of effect, Yeats presents the Enchantress's unconsciously lesbian passion for the shepherdess with sympathy: a sympathy that Gonne endorsed in favoring the Enchantress and hating Naschina [The Collected Letters: Volume I, 1865-1895].

"The Wanderings of Oisin" (completed before Yeats met Gonne, but substantially revised thereafter) also has a heroine who, like Armstrong, takes the sexual initiative. Niamh "a child of the mighty Shee" comes from the land of the young to claim Oisin as her lover. As Yeats climbed into Armstrong's pony cart, Oisin mounts Niamh's steed and is captured by her: "she bound me / In triumph with her arms around me." Marital status, however, changes the "amorous demon" to "a frightened bird." Once "The gentle Niamh [is] my wife," she is made timid by fear of losing Oisin. Each time an object from Ireland reminds him of the human world he has left behind, Niamh, "white with sudden cares," tries to distract him by moving on. When he finally goes back she is left lamenting like Calypso or Dido: "I would die like a small withered leaf in the autumn, for breast unto breast / We shall mingle no more." The epic form, unlike the lyric, gave Yeats a traditional model of masculinity: the epic hero leaves his women behind. Although Yeats later mockingly represented Oisin as "led by the nose / Through three enchanted islands," he was retrospectively projecting the masterful, rejecting Gonne into the timid and devoted figure of Niamh:

But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?

At the time of the original composition he could not have been starved for her bosom, since he had not yet encountered her. Nevertheless, the lines describing Niamh, which were minimally changed during Yeats's numerous revisions, employ many of the images later associated with Gonne:

A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode
On a horse with a bridle of findrinny;
And like a sunset were her lips,
A stormy sunset o'er doomed ships.

A Rossettian iconography was waiting for its incarnation.

Yeats attempted no more epics. Aware that an audience accustomed to the "manly" patriotic ballad verse of The Spirit of the Nation might not appreciate his lyrics, he attempted in "To Ireland in the Coming Times" (1892) to establish himself as a masculine writer in a political context:

Know, that I would accounted beTrue brother of a companyThat sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,Ballad and story, rann and song.

This poem subsumes the erotic longings focused on the symbol of the Rose under a political agenda: like many Irish poets before him Yeats writes love poetry to his country under the guise of a woman. One who must insist that he is the "true brother" of Davis, Mangan, and Ferguson, however, obviously expects his audience (explicitly constructed as male, as "him who ponders well) to doubt his gender identification, and suspect the femininity of his subject matter:

Nor be I any less of them, [the true brothers]
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.

Yeats knows that his pursuit of "faeries, dancing under the moon" situates him on the margins of acceptable discourse. The lyric writer embraces a poetics that is already culturally gendered: as Parker [in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property] suggests, "much of the history of lyric associates it with the female or the effeminate." Its characteristics of emotion, brevity, and intimacy can be negatively coded as hysteria, triviality, and embarrassing self-revelation. The lyric writer may exploit the feminine, but he is also contaminated by it.

"The Madness of King Goll" (1887), for example, depicts the renunciation of political authority and prowess in war for the metaphorically feminine domain of nature, poetry, and madness. Abandoning his defense of Ireland against the Viking invaders, Goll becomes a crazed wanderer in the woods, a celebrant of the nature goddess Orchil. Only his harp affords him relief: poetry justifies his madness and alienation from masculine pursuits. The poem ends disastrously, however, with the instrument broken and the poet still exiled from the male world of political action: "My singing fades, the strings are torn, / I must away by wood and sea." Yeats's identification with this sexual and poetic impasse is suggested by his father's portrait of him as the mad king holding the broken harp.

Goll's pattern is repeated by Fergus, who in the Taín is a figure of great potency, the lover of the insatiable Queen Maeve. Yeats's Fergus seeks to exchange the public responsibilities of manhood for "the dreaming wisdom" of the Druid. The Druid warns of the loss of power and diminution of masculinity inherent in the choice of wisdom, dreams, and poetry:

Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks
And on these hands that may not lift the sword,
This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.
No woman's loved me, no man sought my help.

Allen Grossman [in Poetic Knowledge in The Early Yeats: A Study of The Wind Among The Reeds] argues that in Yeats's early poetry the wind, symbol of vague desires and hopes, also represents the shifting and unstable libido. The image of the Druid's body "trembling like a wind-blown reed" suggests that, in choosing dreams, the Druid and Fergus open themselves to the sorrow of infinite and unsatisfied desire.

Desire, in "The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland," destroys what society has defined as masculinity. The dreamer is on the threshold of manhood—as lover, as money-maker, as perpetrator of violence—but he is immobilized by the image of a timeless, feminine Faeryland where "Danaan fruitage makes a shower of moons." He is ruined by his inability to adapt to the patriarchal order, and by his impossible desire for a maternal paradise. Yeats seldom wrote about his mother. When he did, he associated her with Ireland and with the oral tradition, emphasizing her fondness for exchanging stories about fairies and supernatural events with the fishermen's wives at Howth. As a collector of Irish fairy stories he associated himself with the only happiness he ever saw his mother enjoy. In 1887 the unhappily married Susan Yeats suffered a stroke, and became mentally impaired. Yeats describes people who have withdrawn from the world into total or partial insanity as "away" or absent in fairyland. His account of his mother's stroke as a liberation into "perfect happiness" suggests that he saw her too, in her twelve-year absence, as an inhabitant of fairyland. Yeats's vision of fairyland as the place of the mother, a psychic retreat from the problems and challenges of the world, was ambivalent: the cost of feminine wisdom might be insanity. Of the fairies he wrote:

It is natural, too, that there should be a queen to every household of them, and that one should hear little of their kings, for women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancient peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom. The self, which is the foundation of our knowledge, is broken in pieces by foolishness, and is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, and therefore fools may get, and women do get of a certainty, glimpses of much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey.

Women, fairies, primitives, lunatics, and saints fracture the phallic, unified Cartesian self, foundation of the Law of the Father. Yeats felt his selfhood dispersed and threatened but his poetry enabled by his identification with these marginal figures.

Male selfhood and its constitution in language are central to "The Song of the Happy Shepherd" and "The Sad Shepherd." The Happy Shepherd rejects war, philosophy, and science, but, believing that "Words alone are certain good," he clings to the masculine Logos, to the constitutive importance of language: "The wandering earth herself may be / Only a sudden flaming word." He solipsistically affirms the self and its speech as the only "truth," but male identity is sustained by an Other:

Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Rewording in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood.

In "The Sad Shepherd" the "twisted, echo-harbouring shell" is characterized as female by "her wildering whirls." As in the myth of the nymph Echo, woman is a melodious hollow chamber, a sounding-board for male complaint. The Ovidian reference, however, also ironizes the speaker by identifying him with Narcissus. The happy shepherd, a verbal narcissist, suggests that the male find a sympathetic female who will repeat his words in her own way. She will add nothing original, nor will she speak of herself: man provides the lyrics, woman the melody. This hierarchical opposition, however, is complicated by the fact that in rewording Logos the "echo-harbouring shell" also transforms it into poetry: for Yeats the supremely important act. The masculine "brotherhood" of words will take a "pearly" color from the vessel through which it has passed.

"The Song of the Happy Shepherd," moreover, is answered by its companion poem, "The Sad Shepherd," in which the sea-shell retakes the initiative. When the protagonist attempts to communicate with the stars, the sea, and the dewdrops, those archetypally "feminine" natural presences are busy talking to themselves. He therefore

Sought once again the shore, and found a shell,
And thought, will my heavy story tell
Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send
Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;
And my own tale again for me shall sing,
And my own whispering words be comforting,
And lo! my ancient burden may depart.

The words "I," "my," and "me" dominate this passage. The egotistical shepherd discovers, however, that the "wildering whirls" of the female sea-shell dissipate the imperial self:

Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;
But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone
Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan
Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.

The world is not a single male word, Logos, comprehensible to all, but many female voices singing "inarticulate" melodies among themselves. In Kristevan terms, one who speaks the language of the father, the language of lack and desire, confronts but cannot understand the semiotic language of the mother, the "wildering whirls" of the onomatopoeic song of self-containment: he

Cried all his story to the dewdrops glistening.
But naught they heard, for they are always listening,
The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping.

In these two poems Yeats questions the relation of gender to poetry. Femininity is figured as oceanic, the origin both of being and of verse; but Yeats complicates this familiar representation by making the female archetypes impervious to the male who seeks to use them for his own expressive ends. They sing their own song. In [Hélène] Cixous's words, Yeats is one of those poets who frequently, though not always, "let something different from tradition get through." As a man who loves women and respects their difference while he identifies with them, and as a writer aware that the anxiety of masculinity is also the anxiety of modernity, he remakes inherited forms and tropes while remaining deeply conscious of his poetic precursors.

In early poems that are explicitly addressed to a mistress, and therefore formally located in the love tradition, Yeats accepts certain conventions: the woman as goddess, as Muse, as aesthetic object. His revisions of the genre, however, are demonstrated in his handling of the carpe diem formula. Poems in the carpe diem tradition, modelled on the works of Horace, Catullus, and Ovid, urge immediate sexual enjoyment in terms that devalue the object of desire. Although he wrote several poems within the tradition, Yeats could not muster the masculine bravado required by a genre that blatantly proffers male sexuality. In assuming the existence of female sexual pleasures, the carpe diem poets sometimes arrive at a cheerfully lascivious mutuality: Marvell enjoins his Coy Mistress to "roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball." Behind the impatient energy lies a threat, however. In Twelfth Night Shakespeare's Orsino voices the master metaphor of the genre: "For women are as roses whose fair flower / Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour." Innumerable manipulators of the formula use the rosebud cliché to insist that the woman who refuses to yield her chastity will wither on the branch, her essential biological purpose unfulfilled. Edmund Waller's "Go, Lovely Rose" epitomizes a tradition in which the perennial conflation of woman with nature emphasizes the passivity of the female, whose function is to display herself for male "commendation" and consumption:

Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Even the syntax is passive. The comparison becomes overtly coercive in the final stanza, where the rose is instructed to:

Instead of concluding that the cruel mistress feared pregnancy, objected to his character or looks, or preferred someone else, the carpe diem poet arrogantly insisted that the woman's virginity was like uninvested capital: unless "used" by him it was "wasted." Waller implies that he is the young woman's only chance: if she refuses him she will never find another. In "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" Herrick also deploys withering rosebuds to claim that a woman sexually unused is a woman dead:

Then be not coy, but use your time;
And while you may, goe marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.

Herrick is specific about the social implications of his economic and horticultural metaphors: if a woman "spends" time without "using" it to service a man, she will become a superfluous old maid. The message is repeated in poem after poem: woman's only function is to please physically and to procreate. She needs to make the most of her brief bloom: once it has gone she is worthless. Poets admit that men die too, but their useful and natural lives more nearly coincide. Loss of manly beauty does not mean loss of manly function.

Yeats did not present Gonne with Marvell's grotesque choice: yield your virginity to me or to the worms. His rejection of this convention may be demonstrated by comparing "When You are Old" with Ronsard's "Quand Vous Serez Bien Vielle," from which it derives:

Quand vous serez bien vielle, au soir, à la chandelle,Assise aupres du feu, devidant & filant,
Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant,Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j'estois belle.

Ronsard uses the conventional theme of mutability as an "erotic threat." If his mistress fails to satisfy him, "Vous serez au fouyer une vielle acroupie, I Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain." She will be lonely and regretful because she has missed her chance with him, and he enjoys imagining her unhappiness. Yeats does not resort to such sexual bullying. His beloved is not admonished: "Vivez, si m'en croyez, n'attendez a demain: I Cueillez des aujourd'huy les roses de la vie." Yeats makes no mention of those perennially transient roses, nor is his poem an attempt at seduction. The woman will age whether or not she requites his love: he offers her the poem as a source of melancholy pleasure during the sleepy twilight of old age, a reminder that

Although his verses recall her lost youth they do not accuse her of cruelty towards her celebrant: love has "fled"; she has not repelled him by her "fier desdain." The deterioration caused by aging is not used as a weapon against her; instead the poet lovingly details her present charm: her "soft look" and her "moments of glad grace." Ronsard's object of desire has no specific characteristics; she is, simply and unoriginally, "belle." Yeats values particular beauties of her body, but is even more attracted by beauty of soul: unlike other suitors he loved "the pilgrim soul in you / And loved the sorrows of your changing face." In his Introduction to The Penguin Book of Love Poetry Stallworthy notes with pained surprise that throughout the entire amatory tradition, "We look in vain for the features, lineaments of a living woman." It is Stallworthy's surprise that is remarkable: women in this tradition are objects, not individuals. Yeats's "pilgrim soul," however, a phrase we associate with Gonne's courage and determination, provides an exception to this rule. It associates her, moreover, with the journeying quester of male mythology rather than with the passive maiden of the courtly tradition. Nor can a pilgrim soul wither like a youthful body: Yeats subverts the carpe diem genre even as he employs it. His refusal to imitate Ronsard's sonnet form (his poem has twelve lines instead of fourteen) may even suggest a stylistic disengagement from that most traditional vehicle of the love tradition.

Instead of using mutability as a coercive strategy, Yeats promises to love his mistress even when she has lost the bloom of youth, and whether or not she yields to him. While others may desert her, he will remain faithful:

Time's bitter flood will rise,
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.

In assuring her that what he values is a beauty that he will always see, no matter what her outward appearance, Yeats abandons the crude assumption that a woman's worth is coterminous with her beauty. "The Folly of Being Comforted" enacts his rejection of that assumption:

The beauty of Yeats's beloved, which consists in energy rather than passivity, in "nobility" rather than in freshness of the flesh, can only increase with the passage of time. Here Yeats employs a modified, couplet form of the Shakespearian sonnet, but his claim that "Time can but make herbeauty over again" challenges Shakespeare's basic premise, which is that nothing but art or procreation can withstand the depredations of "Devouring Time" (Sonnet 19). Despite his emotional use of the concluding couplet, "if she'd but turn her head, / You'd know the folly of being comforted," Yeats refuses to claim, as Shakespeare does, that "in black ink my love may still shine bright" (Sonnet 65): a claim that witnesses more to the poet's desire for personal immortality than to the qualities of the beloved. In "The Folly of Being Comforted" the older woman inspires a devotion unlinked to the flawless skin and auburn hair of the young beauty:

Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.

Yeats's insecure masculinity prevented him from employing the sexually cynical poetics of the carpe diem mode. His use of the woman-as-rose metaphor … reflected his opinion that, "The only two powers that trouble the deeps are religion and love." His Rose is not a reminder of falling petals, but a Dantesque sacred symbol and an eter nally desirable image of Ireland.