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Ezra Pound in London. Perhaps Yeats was aware of their affair and felt vicarious fascination?

The girl in the poem was young (hence the reference to her future) so it might have been about his wife, who was called George, short for Georgina, except that I soon discovered that he writes in a completely different style about her, far less sexual, almost like a long-married Darby and Joan, or simply good friends. Later it occurred to me that they were above all very successful business partners. His poem "Solomon and the Witch" is about George, casting them both as sooth-sayers and clairvoyants in an affectionate partnership. Yet he says "Maybe the bride-bed brings despair / For each an imagined image brings / And finds a real image there." Who might his imagined image have been?

George's experience was the root of his poem "An Image from a Past Life" written Summer - September 1919'. She had had a vision of a "sweetheart from another lifeforced to linger from vague distressher arms above her head" The spectre demonstrates that George appeared to be still jealous of his past relationship with Maud Gonne, possibly because he had remained on good terms with her in the ten years that followed. Yeats seemed always to get on well with past amours. I found myself wondering whether George was normally envious of his ex-lovers or whether she had reason at this time to be suspicious. Was he in love again, and was she trying to find out the object of his affections? In contrast, "Under Saturn", written November 1919, reveals him as very faithful to George. Or was it an equivocal plea of innocence?

Yeats' young lover could not, however, have been Maud. In the first place, his relationship with her, as revealed by his poem "On a Political Prisoner" written 10-29 January 1919, was at this time far from amorous. After the death of her husband Sean MacBride in the Easter Uprising of 1916 she had become "Madame MacBride", the martyr's wife, to the adoring Irish public, and therefore she had tried to return from her home in France to Dublin, although banned by the British authorities for her vocal support of the Republican movement. Passing through England she had been detained and imprisoned in London. Yeats, who had despised her husband and utterly disapproved of her political activities, wrote that she had been lovely once, but now she had no sexual presence. Her mind was "a bitter, an abstract thing", she was full of "enmity", "drinking the foul ditch"; she was "blind" and

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