Semester 5 – CC12

The Significance of the title of No Second Troy

Name: Payel Dey

Subject: English Honours

College: Maharaja Manindra Chandra College

College Roll Number: A-121

University Roll Number: 202211-11-0027

University Registration Number: 211-1211-0060-20

Professor: Madhusri Mukherjee

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Declaration

I hereby declare that this project report titled " The Significance of the title of No

Second Troy.” submitted to the department of English honours, Maharaja Manindra Chandra

College (Calcutta University) is a record of original work done by me under the guidance of

Prof. Madhusri Mukherjee.

The information and data given in this report is authentic to the best of my

knowledge. This Project Report is not submitted to any other university or institution for the

award of any degree, diploma or fellowship or published any time before.

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to my Professor Madhusri

Mukherjee who gave me the golden opportunity to do this wonderful project on the topic "

The Significance of the title of No Second Troy”, which also helped me in doing a lot of

Research and I came to know about so many new things. I am really thankful to her.
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Payel Dey

Professor Madhusri Mukherjee

English Honours

December 15, 2022

The Significance of the title of No Second Troy

No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats, a great Irish poet, is poem about the love

relationship between the poet and Maud Gonne, devastatingly beautiful Irish woman. No

Second Troy was published in the collection The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). To

express the extraordinary beauty of Gonne, Yeats invokes a comparison with Helen of Troy,

the most beautiful and controversial woman of the classical world, who was the cause behind

the Trojan War, as sung in Homer’s Iliad. However, the poet goes beyond his romantic

attraction towards Gonne. In his elevation of the beauty of Gonne and his ‘misery, even as he

brings Helen in the context, the poet snubs the middle-class Irish people, who lack the ability

and resolution to understand her extraordinary character and personality and rise to her

expectations. The age itself does not deserve Maud Gonne, who is so much like the Helen of

Troy.

Yeats was shattered by Maud’s sudden marriage to John MacBride in the February of

1903. Maud Gonne was the Irish revolutionary whom Yeats loved but who rejected his

proposals of marriage. No Second Troy was written after the final rejection of Yeats’s love

offer and sudden marriage to John MacBride, who, ironically was later made the martyr

of Irish Freedom Movement by the efforts of Yeats himself. Although this marriage of Maud

and MacBride resulted in a separation, two years later, it left Yeats in great distress. In “No

Second Troy”, Yeats works admits his infatuation for Gonne, while successfully coming out

of the provocation to blame her for causing him emotional misery by refusing his love. The
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poet is unhappy that Maud Gonne has not responded to his love, but he argues that he should

not blame her for filling his days with misery. The poet says that blaming her for all this is

useless because things just could not have been otherwise. When she possesses beauty of a

kind which being high, solitary and very stem is something rare in this age; when her beauty

is like a tightened bow and her mind which due to its nobleness has the simplicity and zeal of

time, nothing could have made her remain peaceful. All this oratory, this zeal and its inciting

were things which just could not have been helped with the kind of gifts she possessed. He

should not also blame her for teaching innocent Irish people the revolutionary methods to get

freedom for the country of Ireland. The poet is scornful of the petty violence of those who

would ‘hurl the little streets upon the great’, instigate the innocent people of Ireland to

perpetrate violence against the British rulers, which is futile. The poet blames the

revolutionary lady for hurting his love cruelly but waves that blame and is prepared to forget

and forgive her. However, he fails to understand her political attitude and the revolutionary

violence that the lady preached to her countrymen (Irish people) for winning the freedom of

her country against the British tyranny.

The poem seems to be divided into two parts; the first part deals more in the empirical

realm (from emotional pain to political defiance and outrage), the second part veer off into

the ethereal, and apocalyptic, world of ancient Troy and its Helen. The phrase 

“why should I blame her that she filled my days with misery” 

describes the pain of Yeats’s unrequited love. Also, Yeats exalts his would be love by

etherealizing her as above what he condemns in his own time (not natural in such age and

being high solitary) and predicates upon her qualities of a goddess (like; peaceful, noble,

beauty) even a warrior goddess (like; fire, like a tightened bow, most stern). In the last two

lines, containing the third and fourth rhetorical questions, the poet makes explicit her
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comparison with her with Helen of Troy, but regrets metaphorically that Ireland was no Troy

to burn for Maud Gonne, as Troy had done for Helen. Just because there was no "second

Troy" for her to destroy, she had to destroy other things – like the speaker's happiness, and

the lives of Irish commoners.

The first Troy, of course, was destroyed because of a quarrel over Helen, another

politically troublesome beauty from another "age", ancient Greece. The poem No Second

Troy is a strong call towards peace leaving the violent way of war or destruction. The poem

appeals that no beauty like Helen of Troy or to-day’s Maud Gonne will cause the destruction

of another beauty like “Troy”. There will remain only peace and love in the world. The

purpose of civilization is not to provide bonfires for eternal or heroic beauty. Ireland has not

failed because it has not been burnt like Troy. The complete pattern of images, as well as the

rhetorical control in the poem, are clearly demonstrated only when we read the last line. The

poet clearly demonstrates the destructive aspect of beauty not only in personal terms, but also

in national as well as mythological terms.

The title gives a unity to the thought of the poem. The poem is a comment on the

fallen values of the time. Even as Ireland desperately needs a cultural and political revolution

against the colonial occupation of Britain, the middle class is too engrossed in its mechanical

routine and mercantile ambitions to worry about the country. Comparing Maud Gonne with

Helen, Yeats says though she is equally beautiful and noble, Ireland is not the place

she deserved, as it would not be truly inspired as Troy was by Helen. There

would be ‘no second Troy.’

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Works Cited

Yeats, Butler William, The Green Helmet, and Other Poems, 1912.

A Critical Analysis of Poem No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats.”Enamsnote.blogspot.com,

Kumar, Dharmender, No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats, Poem Analysis, 21 Oct, 2016,

“The Significance of Title” No Second Troy The Literary World, 10 May 2022,