Yeats and Maud Gonne: Marriage and the Astrological Record, 1908–09

Abstract

OF ALL THE EXTANT astrological manuscripts recording Yeats’s relationship with Maud Gonne, the most important are those in the large, beautifully bound writing book which she gave to him in Paris in June 1908. 1 Her gift marked the revival of their earlier ‘spiritual marriage’; in the course of the next year and a half Yeats used the book to record the dreams, visions, and planetary positions marking the development of their renewed partnership. This unusual journal provides not only basic biographical information but also extensive evidence of his techniques of meditation and prediction, both those stemming from his early training in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and those he was developing from his later practice of astrology. As he wrote to Florence Farr on 7 October 1907, ‘I am hoping to find in the aspects a basis of evocation, which is really what interests me.’ ( L 500). The journal of 1908–09 preserves what is known of these evocations of the planets, while the surrounding astrological records testify to a mixture of vision and astrological inquiry surpassed only after Yeats’s marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917, in the creation of his final metaphysical work, A Vision. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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