No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

I could have chosen one of any number of Yeats poems, some wonderfully sweet, some horrifying. This one is perhaps not among his best (though it is great) but I have chosen it because I thought that it made a nice companion piece to yesterday's poem, "Helen."

"Helen" is about Helen of Troy specifically, "No Second Troy" only uses her as a point of reference. Both have similar outlooks, however, choosing to portray Helen (and, in Yeats, others like her) as the cause of great violence. Yeats goes two steps farther: One, he blames Helen directly for the carnage ("Was there another Troy for her to burn?"); two, he assumes that this aspect of Helen's identity is so clear that he can use her as a metaphor for his troubled relationship with Irish revolutionary Maude Gonne.

But I do not think that this poem necessarily has to be read as a historical artifact. I love the bitterness of "No Second Troy" because I think it is a universal bitterness for those of us who have been wronged in love. I can identify with Yeats' sense of love and admiration for the woman who has "beauty tightened like a bow"--a wonderful phrase that manages to perfectly capture a certain sort of beauty and a tendency toward irritability and violence--but also the paradoxical sense of antipathy:

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught ignorant men to most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?

Of course, few of us have ex-lovers whose savagery has sociopolitical aspects too, as Gonne and Helen had, who would have "hurled the little streets upon the great."

But the strangest thing about "No Second Troy" is the way that Yeats comes to terms with his relationship, saying quite plainly:

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Is this fatalism? Is it even forgiveness? Is it closure, or reconciliation, or something more bitter and deeply disturbing? If Yeats' femme fatale can only be what she is, what must the rest of us be?