Yeats's `Mystical Marriage'

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ANYONE who knows Yeats's poetry knows of his long infatuation with the fiery and beautiful Irish nationalist revolutionary Maud Gonne: the latter-day Helen portrayed in his poem "No Second Troy."

"What could have made her peaceful with a mind/ That nobleness made simple as a fire,/ With beauty like a tightened boy, a kind/ That is not natural in an age like this...."

She is the "Pallas Athena in that straight back and arrogant head" commemorated in a later poem, "Beautiful Lofty Things," and, of course, the aging woman tenderly addressed in the poem beginning "When you are old and grey and full of sleep," a piece written when the poet and his beloved were still in …