A Deep-sworn vow~

As a university second language learner is still difficult for me to read and get the real meaning of the poems in English, read them only once is not enough. A deep-sworn vow is an example, it really caught my attention after three times and an analysis to understand how deep could be the message this poem contains. Yeats and his frustrated love story with Maud Gonne can be identified through his poetry and, in this particular case due to the fact that we can imagine him talking about the situations in which he still remembers her.

If we analyze it, the poem shows the extremes that could be reached by a human when he/she is influenced by a overwhelm situation, emotion, person, etc. and cannot escape from it. In that way, love is an unconscious feeling and overwhelming: we are powerless in front of it, and we cannot choose who we love or how to react towards the love we feel. But here in the poem love is transformed into a heartbreak nightmare which takes form of a very special person to play with Yeats emotions, canceling out his sense, driving him mad to the point that heartbreak has the power to suddenly appear in the most unexpected situation. Thus, love or heartbreak is strong enough to take advantage of Yeats’ unconsciousness to act.

So, taking his unfortunate love story into account, we can realize that Maud Gonne left a huge mark in Yeats that forced him try new options in order to erase the vow that could not be kept. Those options could be to act so dangerously until face death, to sleep so much to escape from reality or to drink a lot of alcohol to forget for a while. Also, we can interpret that Others (meaning people or even the options already mentioned) were lodged between him and the vow to fulfill the emotional emptiness.

Furthermore, I would like to highlight that an emotion is momentary (like anger) and a feeling lasts in time (like grudge) and that the difference between them makes more important the mark Maud left; she is what Yeats still finds in the very deep of his mind. She is no longer a person (something physical) because she is gone, instead she becomes something psychological as a feeling that lasts and it is always there.

There is also the possibility that the deep-sworn vow was done by Yeats himself (instead of her) to forget Maud and bury the memories with her; but unfortunately she does not keep the vow and appears in the most unexpected situations, even unconsciously. So, every time he wants to escape in danger, dreams or drinks she is there.

To sum up, Yeats is a modernist poet and I believe that to understand his poem we have to bear in mind that maybe what he is asking is: "Is perhaps love so strong that it can appear in moments of deep unconsciousness? Or is only me who brings her back?”