When W.B Yeats was more than 50 he proposed to the love of his life for the third time, three times refused. He was desperate, lonely. So after his last attempt he walked down the beach to where Maud’s 22 year old daughter Issel lived and proposed to her—-after all, she had done as much rather flippantly some time earlier. And wisely, she refused him too. He wrote “To a Child Dancing Upon the Wind” about this rejection from both mother and daughter and though his situation is not yours or mine, what you hear in these lines is a man’s heart despondent, saved only by the poetry that is his true lover. Yeats rushed back to London and, to meet a mystical deadline made in a seance he’d attended, he proposed Georgie Hydes Lee, the daughter of friend. She said yes. Everyone remarked on her intelligence. Yeats thought himself betraying of his new wife, less than half his age. She took to occult automatic writing with Yeats asking questions to her spirit guides—-this after they had not consummated the marriage for three nights. Georgie’s pen would write out answers to Yeat’s queries, “a factory for mysterious images.” He then wrote “Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors,” our second poem.
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