Disenchantment with the Modern Age in Yeats' "No Second Troy" Stubborn Irish nationalist loved unrequited all her life. The poem deals with Yeats's disenchantment with the modern age: blind to true beauty, unheroic, and unworthy of the ancient nobility and heroism of Maud Gonne. The “ignorant men,” without “courage equal to desire,” personify Yeats's assignment of blame for his failed attempts to gain Maud Gonne's love. The poet's vision of his beloved as Helen of Troy externalizes his guilt by exposing the modern age's lack of courage and inability to temper Maud Gonne's stubborn heroism and timeless beauty. Yeats wrote this poem in December 1908, relatively early in his lifelong relationship with Maud. Skirts. In a letter to his father dated 29 December 1908, Yeats writes from Paris and mentions lunch with Maud Gonne that afternoon. This was after a three-year period in which Maud Gonne socially distanced herself following the failure of her first marriage in 1905. Although she had seen Maud Gonne around the time she wrote the poem, and there was no documented disagreement, "No Second Troy " is in the past tense, indicating that he has given up on their romantic relationship. The first half of the poem begins with the poet expressing his growing disapproval of Maud Gonne's politics. He wonders if he should "blame her for filling my days with misery." A. Norman Jeffares writes in WB Yeats that "the 'recently' of the second line refers to Maud Gonne's retirement", but the poem seems to blame her inactivity on "ignorant men" for not having "courage equal to desire ", rather than his marital problems. These "ig... middle of paper... timelessness of his beloved also appears in "Reconciliation." Yeats writes, "Some may have blamed you for taking away the verses," leading the poet to write about "kings, / Helmets, and swords, and forgotten things / That were like memories of you." These poems tie together the poet's vision of Maud Gonne as a woman out of place in time, possessing, as Giorgio Melchiori writes, a "proud beauty and fire...in which a noble past collides with a mediocre present." "No Second Troy" attempts to deal with the failure of Yeats's relationship with Maud Gonne without placing blame on either his beloved or himself. The poet criticizes the age they live in and blames her inability to sustain the burning of Troy on ideal beauty. In an age of "ignorant men" whose lack of courage cannot embrace the stoic beauty of Maud Gonne, there is no. it's a second Troy to burn..