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"a leader of the blind." He repeats this disapproval in "The Leaders of the Crowd" and it is also apparent in "A Prayer for My Daughter" written between 29th February and June, 1919, in that he wishes for his daughter the opposite of the life that Maud leads. Moreover, at this time Gonne was roughly 54 years old (about his own age) and had a grown-up daughter. She was therefore hardly a young dancer wanting to go to college as in the Michael Robartes series.

I had thus established that he probably did have a young lover who was not his wife or Maud or Iseult Gonne. The relationship seems to have started in 1918, a year after his marriage, and as far as one could tell she seems to have been a dancer who wanted to go to college. Of course, even if he did have such a lover, she may not have been my grandmother.

This impression of a lover is strengthened by the poem "Leda and the Swan". At some point in his reading Yeats had come across "Some moralist or mythological poet" who compared " the solitary soul to a swan" and, taking it as a description of himself, had declared " I am satisfied with that"[2] He wrote those lines in about 1920, probably before he wrote of himself as a swan in the poem mentioned.

Many people, very well qualified and also well-versed in Yeats' oeuvre, have told me that this poem has nothing to do with the act depicted, the rape of a virgin too young and innocent to resist. They tell me it is about Russia and Europe, the threat of the Revolution to western Europeans, or maybe it is about the earth goddess being taken advantage of by men. I believe that these people are living in cloud cuckoo land, because Yeats had never, before or after this poem, written about communism or the threat of external conflicts to Ireland, and the type of mystical symbolism favoured by Robert Graves in this period did not have any significance for him. In his dealings as a politician he did not normally comment on foreign policy; he was far more concerned with the development of the new Irish Free State and with building peace instead of civil war. In all his dealings with foreign places at this time, Yeats concentrated on what was philosophical and concrete, such as Japanese Noh plays and ancient Indian writings, but not on politics.

On the contrary, "Leda and the Swan" appears to me to be less about politics than a portrayal of an explicit sexual encounter between an older, more powerful and experienced man and a young virgin, in which the contrast is so

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