YEATS, William Butler (1865-1939). Autograph manuscript signed ("W.B. Yeats"), being a fair copy of his poem "When Helen Lived," inscribed for John Preece, n.p., n.d.

Oblong quarto, one page, 148 x 175mm, conjoined blank (faint edge shadow where previously matted). Provenance: John Preece, 1895-1969, Australian literary editor and bookseller (presentation inscription) – Bonhams New York, 15 December 2021, lot 112.

"When Helen Lived." Presentation of a complete poem by W.B. Yeats. Helen of Troy and the Trojan War were often subjects in Yeats’s poetry, Helen being a stand-in for the great unrequited love of Yeats’s life, Maud Gonne; and the Trojan War as a foil for the Irish republican uprising which Gonne actively supported. "When Helen Lived," “No Second Troy” and “A Woman Homer Sung” were all written within a few years of each other and first published between 1912 and 1916.

“When Helen Lived” was written in 1913, and, reading it in conjunction with Yeats’s diary (where he repeats the phrase “a word and a jest”), leaves no doubt that Maud Gonne is undoubtedly its muse. Maud Gonne’s son, Seán, was then about nine years old and the family had been living in Paris for almost ten years (avoiding Gonne’s abusive ex-husband who had moved home to Dublin). In full: “We cried in our despair / That men desert, / For some trivial affair / Or noisy, insolent sport, / Beauty that we have won / From bitterest hours; / Yet we, had we walked within / Those topless towers / Where Helen walked with her boy, / Had given but as the rest / Of the men and women of Troy, A word and a jest.”

In the present autograph transcription, there is one word different in the first line from the published version. Yeats’s hand becomes noticeably more hurried as the poem continues.