Skyler White

W.B. Yeats

On a Child’s Death

You shadowy armies of the dead
Why did you take the starlike head
The faltering feet, the little hand?
For purple kinds are in your band
And there the hearts of poets meet;
Why did you take the flatering feet?
She had much need of some fair thing
To make love spread his quiet wing
Above the tumult of her days
And shut out foolish blame and praise.
She has her squirrel and her birds
But these have no sweet human words
And cannot call her by her name:
Their love is but a woodland flame.
You wealthy armies of the dead
Why did you take the starlike head?

W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne met at his father’s house at 3 Blenheim Place, New Bedford, London on January 30, 1898. He fell immediately in love, referring to that moment later, in his autobiography, as when “the troubling of [his] life began.”

I got there on a Tuesday after noon having spent the morning at the Chiswick Library poring over blueprints of the house’s interior.

Maud Gonne

Maud did not remember the meeting, claiming to have met Will at some later point.  She left London a few weeks later for France, where she shortly became pregnant with  her married French lover, the political radical Lucien Millevoye.  Will proposed to Maud (for the first of many times) two years later, in Howth, where they “walked the cliff paths at Howth and dined at a little cottage near the Bailey Light House.”

Bailey Lighthouse

I walked along the pier by the lighthouse, but there’s no longer any cottage there. There are some adorable restaurants on an adjacent dock, but this picture is taken from the beach.

“Suddenly she was called back to France, and she told me in confidence that she had joined a secret political society, and though she had come to look upon its members as self-seekers and adventurers, she could not disobey this, the first definite summons it has sent her.”

In reality, she’d gotten word that Georges, the son she’d had with Millevoye, was ill with meningitis.  She raced back to France, but the child died.  She had him embalmed and buried him in a crypt in Samois-sur-Seine.

Samois Crypt

“The idea came to her that the child might be reborn, and she had gone back to Millevoye, in the vault under the memorial chapel.  A girl child was born, now two years old.”

Samois Crypt Interior

Sixteen years later, this child, conceived in the crypt of her dead brother, would turn Will down when, in a one-month span, her proposed to her, her mother (again) and Georgie Hyde Lees.  Georgie, whose initiation Yeats had sponsored a few years earlier into The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, having physically fought Aleister Crowley over its future course the previous year, was the last asked to join, and the only one to accept.