The Honeymoon Had Extra Guests

A Poetry Tale about W. B. Yeats, told by Hello Doggo.

In the summer of nineteen seventeen, W. B. Yeats, aged fifty-two, proposed to Iseult Gonne. She was the young daughter of Maud Gonne, the woman he’d been proposing to, on and off, for decades.

Iseult said no.

A few weeks later, he proposed to someone else. Georgie Hyde-Lees. Twenty-five, clever, and deeply into the occult. He would come to call her George. They married on the twentieth of October.

The honeymoon, at a hotel in Ashdown Forest, did not go well. As George’s biographer tells it, a letter arrived from Iseult, and Yeats sank into gloom.

So his new bride decided to fake it. A spot of automatic writing, just to cheer him up.

Four days into the marriage, Yeats later wrote, she took up a pencil. Soon he was telling Lady Gregory what had come out. All was well, it said, with the bird, and his action had been right for both. The bird, he understood, was Iseult. His misery, he said, lifted.

Then, George later felt, something else took over.

It went on for years. Hundreds of sittings. Thousands of pages. It became his strange book, A Vision. When Yeats offered to spend the rest of his life explaining it, the answer came back: “No, we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”

Hoax, shared fantasy, or something stranger? Nobody can say. Maybe not even George.

Nearly thirty years earlier, he’d written about longing to be alone in the bee-loud glade.

He got a honeymoon for two, and an unknown number of guests.