Also, his use of first person forms a direct dialogue with his readers, which in a way triggers a more personal readership. However, when Yeats wrote this poem, he was no longer the 24-year-old young man who fell for the innocent "apple-blossom" but rational enough to be aware of the potential crisis that she might cause. Therefore, as a middle-aged man, Yeats described Gonne's beauty as a "tightened bow, a kind/ That is not natural in an age like this" (8-9). Yeats compared Gonne to a weapon with the adjective "tightened" implying certain damages that could be provoked by this bow. In this case, the "tightened bow" is a metaphor of the marriage rejections from Gonne, whose "arrow" shot right through Yeats's heart. The title "No Second Troy" clearly indicates his attitude against Helen who triggers the Trojan War because of her excessive beauty. In Yeats's later poem "A Prayer for my Daughter," he held a negative attitude toward a women's extreme beauty as it would result in loss of "natural kindness and maybe/ The heart-revealing intimacy" (22-23). The image of Maud Gonne in Yeats's works is presented as a flawless beauty, however, this beauty potentially carries dangerous power that not only exerts on Yeats but also on other Irish affairs.
Apart from comparing Gonne's threatening beauty to a weapon, Yeats also interpreted Gonne as a feminist who always had the dominant role in the romantic relationship, overruling while emasculating the man in order to manipulate him to resort to violence. According to Macrae, although Yeats was born in a family with over-powering pressure of his father and lack of pressure from his mother, "[oddly] enough, Yeats was attracted to forceful women and, certainly in the earlier years, he tended to be a very subservient male suitor" (103). Therefore, Gonne's forceful and dominating personality became fostered due to Yeats's subjection.
