7 7 A Foolish, Passionate Man: Margot Ruddock and Ethel Mannin

In April 1934, Yeats confided ‘that for about three years…he had lost all inspiration and had been unable to write anything new.’¹Close The recipient of this confidence was Dr. Norman Haire, a London surgeon and author of a book about the rejuvenation operation pioneered by Eugen Steinach in Vienna in 1918, where its recipients had included Sigmund Freud. The operation was no more than a vasectomy, but was widely believed to improve erotic performance and vitalize the entire body. Associating his loss of inspiration with an inability to have erections, (Second Puberty 7–8), Yeats evidently concluded that renewal of inspiration required a new encounter with the Muse – ‘that dream of Eros which inspires art’ (Croce 168) – and hoped that the Steinach operation would restore both sexual potency and inspiration.

Today there is a considerable, but not undisputed, body of learning that the Steinach operation had no physical effect on sexual performance.²Close Nonetheless, it had a sufficient contemporary reputation that Frank O'Connor feared that Yeats's undergoing the operation would be ‘like putting a Cadillac engine in a Ford car.’ (Second Puberty 8) Although Dr. Haire told Ellmann that the operation did not cure Yeats's impotence (id. at 8), Yeats boasted to Shakespear in a letter of 1 June 1934 that ‘I am still marvelously strong…in some ways better than I was at Woburn Buildings,’ where he and Shakespear had had the ‘many days of happiness’ celebrated in Memoirs. (CL InteLex 6051) The boast is ambiguous, and does not outweigh Dr. Haire's informed report that Yeats's impotence was not cured. It seems indisputable, however, that the aftermath of the operation witnessed an increase in Yeats's sexual desire, paving the way to a new burst of poetry – and conduct – in which sexual desire is valued for its own sake. Yeats described this process as ‘the strange second puberty the operation has given me, the ferment that has come upon my imagination,’ adding that ‘[i]f I write more poetry, it will be unlike anything I have done.’³Close Later, he linked restored inspiration directly to rekindled desire, asserting that the operation revived both ‘my creative power’ and ‘also sexual desire.…’⁴Close

Within four months of the Steinach operation, Yeats had again succeeded in jump‐starting his imagination with yet another imaginary voice, this time that of the outspoken hermit Ribh, the principal voice of ‘Supernatural Songs.’ Ribh shares Yeats's interest in bodily life after death, and reads by the light given off by the post‐death intercourse of Baile and Aillinn, lovers who were ‘[t]ransfigured to pure substance’ with the result that

        when such bodies join

There is no touching here, nor touching there,

Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole;

For the intercourse of angels is a light

Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed.⁵Close

The centerpiece of ‘Supernatural Songs’ is ‘He and She’ (VP 559), which, Yeats told Shakespear, was ‘of course my central myth.’⁶Close It involves the moon and a woman:

As the moon sidles up

Must she sidle up,

As trips the scared moon

Away must she trip:

‘His light had struck me blind

Dared I stop.’

She sings as the moon sings:

‘I am I, am I;

The greater grows my light

The further that I fly.’

All creation shivers

With that sweet cry.

The reader may be forgiven for puzzling over the meaning of Yeats's reference to his ‘central myth,’ or, at least, at his offhanded ‘of course.’ Yeats's comment would have been clearer to Shakespear, who knew that Yeats believed his inspiration was associated with the goddess of the moon, and thus would have recognized the ‘she’ of the poem, who waxes and wanes with the moon, as the poet's Muse – a meaning even more apparent in the initial draft of the poem which begins ‘In love she was like the moon.…’ (PF MM 191) Muse‐like, she is at once sexually enticing and remote: her creative song has the shiver of sexual ecstasy, but the more distant she is from the poet, the greater her light.

The ‘Supernatural Songs’ explore Muse‐related ideas, but show no trace of the inspiration of a living Muse. In fact, ‘Ribh considers Christian Love insufficient’ (VP 558), written in the summer of 1934 (PF MM xxiii), attributes to hatred the function of clearing Yeats's psyche and readying it for inspiration that had hitherto been performed by his Muse. Ribh asks ‘Why should I seek for love or study it?/It is of God and passes human wit.…’ Rather, Ribh studies ‘hatred with great diligence,/For that's a passion in my own control,/A sort of besom that can clear the soul/Of everything that is not mind or sense.’ The author of these lines was clearly ready for a new encounter with a live Muse. He later told Edith Shackleton Heald that ‘George ceased to have an interest in sex,’⁷Close and, as Ellmann summed it up, George ‘countenanced more than she discountenanced’ her husband's late relationships with other women. (M&M xxv) An implicit prayer for a new Muse underlies the lyric with which Yeats closed the preface to The King of the Great Clock Tower and published as ‘A Prayer for Old Age’ (VP 553). He realizes that he may look foolish pursuing a living Muse at age sixty‐nine, but is more than willing to ‘seem/For the song's sake a fool’:

God guard me from those thoughts men think

In the mind alone;

He that sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow‐bone;

From all that makes a wise old man

That can be praised of all;

O what am I that I should not seem

For the song's sake a fool?

I pray – for fashion's word is out

And prayer comes round again –

That I may seem, though I die old,

A foolish, passionate man.

He still adheres to the ‘First Principles’ of 1912: ‘Not to find one's art by the analysis of language or amid the circumstances of dreams but to live a passionate life, and to express the emotions that find one thus in simple rhythmical language.’⁸Close

As fate would have it, within six months of the Steinach operation Yeats received a letter from a twenty‐seven‐year‐old actress and poet, Margot Ruddock, seeking his help with her poetry and in developing a poets' theater in London. Ruddock had lived her young life intensely. Married while still in her teens, to Jack Collis, a Cambridge friend of her brother, she had a son, Michael, who remained in Collis' custody when they divorced.⁹Close She then married actor Raymond Lovell while they were both playing at Bradford, and gave birth to a daughter, Simone, about six months before meeting Yeats. (Id.)¹⁰Close Nonetheless, Yeats sensed in her letters that she was ready to assume the role of Muse. Here was an opportunity to drink of those cups that had been left untasted with Olivia Shakespear. ‘Do not think,’ he wrote, ‘that I await our meeting with indifference.’¹¹Close The meeting did not disappoint. Describing Ruddock in his introduction to a book of her poems, Yeats employed the adjective he had used to characterize Shakespear in Memoirs, calling Ruddock a woman ‘of distinguished beauty.’ Ruddock, however, was fated to wear the mantle of Florence Farr. In words that could have had Farr as their subject, Yeats opined that Ruddock ‘might be a great actress, for she possessed a quality rare upon the stage or, if found there, left unemployed – intellectual passion.’¹²Close Indeed, the image of Farr hovers over Yeats's early correspondence with Ruddock, as he tells her that he may ‘put a book into your hand & ask you to read out some poems,’ and suggests that, ‘as you are a trained actress, a lovely sense of rhythm will make you a noble speaker of verse – a singer & sayer.’¹³Close While stopping short of threatening to bring Farr's psaltery to London, he will ‘probably bring over a zither that we use at the Abbey with Dulacs music’ in the hope that ‘you would think out the singing or speaking of (say) half a dozen of my poems.’¹⁴Close

Frederick Ashton, to whom Yeats brought Ruddock after hearing her recite, bore out Yeats's instinct as to her potential as an actress. He told Roger McHugh that he felt that she had ‘definite potential as an actress but had obviously never fallen into the right hands.’ Much struck by Ruddock's beauty, he found her very intense, a seeming ‘lost soul.’ (LMR 10 n. 2) Yeats, Ashton recalled, ‘was obviously very taken with her.’ (Id.) A first‐hand account of Yeats's emotions is preserved in the unpublished poem, ‘Margot,’ that he sent to Ruddock in November 1934. The poem grounds Ruddock in the context of the regret over ‘[l]ost opportunities to love’ that had been on Yeats's mind at least since the writing of ‘The Empty Cup’:

All famine struck sat I, and then

Those generous eyes on mine were cast,

Sat like other aged men

Dumfoundered, gazing on a past

That appeared constructed of

Lost opportunities to love.

The hope of sexual renewal attendant upon the Steinach operation is reflected in the third stanza, which prays that

The Age of Miracles renew,

Let me be loved as though still young

Or let me fancy that it's true[.] (CL InteLex 6136)

The accompanying letter suggests that one hoped‐for miracle did not occur. It expresses Yeats's ‘utter black gloom’ that ‘perhaps after all … this nervous inhibition has not left me,’ and tells how he ‘pictured Margot unsatisfied and lost.’ Linking inspiration to sexuality, he wonders: ‘How could I finish the poem? How could I finish anything?’

The poem itself is unsatisfying – perhaps suggesting that an unattainable Muse was more of a stimulant to creativity than failed sexual relations with the attainable Margot. In fact, something of a reverse inspirational process seems to have been at work. In a 29 October 1935 letter to Ruddock, for example, Yeats borrowed from ‘Upon a House shaken by the Land Agitation’ (1910) (VP 264) to praise the ‘precision and passion’ of Ruddock's acting. (CL InteLex 6425)

At this stage, Ruddock was more Siren than Muse. According to Homer, the Sirens' song is thrilling, but those who listen to it will be transfixed, ‘lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses,/rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones.…’¹⁵Close Although the Sirens trace their lineage to one or more of the Muses,¹⁶Close their appeal, unlike the Muses, is, as Jean‐Pierre Vernant puts it, ‘unequivocally in the realm of sexual attraction or erotic appeal,’ as evidenced by ‘their cries, [t]heir flowering meadow (leimōn, meadow, is one of the words used to designate female genitalia), [and] their charm (thelxis).'¹⁷Close Vernant explains that ‘[t]he Sirens are the opposite of the Muses’ because their song leads to disabling death:

The Sirens are the opposite of the Muses. Their song has the same charm as that of the daughters of Memory; they too bestow a knowledge that cannot be forgotten. But whoever succumbs to the attraction of their beauty, the seduction of their voices, the temptation of the knowledge they hold in their custody, does not enter that region to live forever in the splendor of eternal renown. Instead, he reaches a shore whitened with bones and the debris of rotting human flesh. (Id. at 105)

Ruddock's erotic song was not particularly inspiring, but neither was it disabling. It was more of a call to a longing that could not be satisfied, akin to Plutarch's view of the Sirens' song as engendering in the soul a longing to break the tie with the body that cannot be satisfied.¹⁸Close

Neither inspired nor disabled, Yeats set about addressing the question posed in the second stanza of ‘Margot’:

O how can I that interest hold?

What offer to attentive eyes? (CL InteLex 6136)

A letter of 11 October 1934 suggests one answer. Yeats tells Ruddock that he is ‘re‐writing The King of the Great Clock Tower giving the Queen a speaking part that you may act it.…’ (CL InteLex 6110) The revised play, titled A Full Moon in March, eliminates the King from the trio of King, Queen and poet. Yeats explained in the preface that there had been ‘a character too many’ in the first play, and that, ‘reduced to the essentials, to Queen and Stroller, the fable should have greater intensity.’¹⁹Close The stark essence of the fable enacts the core Muse principles: the Queen‐Muse is remote and demanding, but, like the Ennoia or Wisdom figure, needs ‘desecration’ through union with the human poet to complete herself, while the poet must sacrifice himself to his Muse to achieve inspiration. This quintessential Muse play was not only written with Ruddock in mind, but, in lines that Yeats told Ruddock were ‘partly addressed to you,’ suggests that the poet is an old man:

Should old Pythagoras fall in love

Little may he boast thereof

(What cares love for this and that?)

Days go by in foolishness

But O how great the sweetness is,

(Crown of gold or dung of swine.)  (CL InteLex 6124; Cf. VPl 979)

At the outset of the short play, the Queen confirms the understanding of the Swineheard (who replaces the Stoller of the prior play) that ‘[h]e that best sings his passion’ for the Queen shall take her for a wife and acquire her kingdom in the bargain. With echoes of the ageing Yeats who feared he had not satisfied Margo, the Swineheard seeks and obtains assurance that the bargain will hold even ‘if some blind aged cripple sing/Better than wholesome men.’ (VPl 981) Even though the Queen reminds the Swineheard that ‘they that call me cruel speak the truth’, the Swineheard vows to ‘embrace body and cruelty.’ (Id. 982–83)

One of the Attendants poses a question about the Queen that goes to the heart of Musedom: ‘What can she lack whose emblem is the moon?’ The answer – ‘desecration and the lover's night’ (VPl 989) – is a reminder that the Wisdom principle must become incarnate in human form, like Simon's Helena, in order to bring her wisdom fully into the world through the words of her inspired poet. Thus, when the Queen asks what she will gain if she proclaims the Swineheard's song the best, the Swineheard offers a song:

A song – the night of love,

An ignorant forest and the dung of swine. (VPl 983)

The compressed action of the play quickly reveals the Queen holding the severed head of the Swineheard, her hands covered in red. The stage directions tell that she dances with the head ‘to drum‐taps, which grow quicker and quicker’ and, as they ‘approach their climax, she presses her lips to the lips of the head’ while her ‘body shivers to the very rapid drum‐taps.’ (Id. 989)

Although Margot had been no more than Siren when Yeats first addressed a poem to her, the play he wrote for her captures the essence of Musedom. The fact that Yeats had Florence Farr in mind when he wrote The King of the Great Clock Tower (see Chapter 2) suggests that his re‐writing the play for Ruddock was another way of re‐writing his life, with Ruddock in the role of Farr, whose play, The Shrine of the Golden Hawk, also featured an ecstatic dance by a priestess of the White Goddess.

Yeats's efforts to hold Ruddock's interest also led to his commenting on, and editing, drafts of her poems. His comments reflect his long‐standing belief that poetry requires both inspiration and ‘techne’ or craft. ‘You always have passion,’ he told Ruddock, ‘that is to say the substance of all art/, but you want a greater technical precission, a greater mastery of deliberately chosen detail.’²⁰Close Yeats's attraction‐holding efforts extended to including seven of Ruddock's poems in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse. ‘I take thee, Life’ (OBMV 418) is representative of the selections:

I take thee, Life,

Because I need,

A wanton love

My flesh to feed.

But still my soul

Insatiate

Cries out, cries out

For its true mate.

This poem is consistent with Yeats's description of Ruddock in his introduction as a ‘religious’ poet. (id. xli) Others, such as, ‘Autumn, crystal Eye’ (OBMV 419) are not readily identifiable as ‘religious’:

Autumn, crystal eye

Look on me,

Passion chilled am I

Like to thee,

Seeking sterner truth,

Even now

Longing for the white

Frozen bough.

All of the Ruddock selections were characterized in Yeats's introduction as ‘little poems, which remind me of Emily Bronte.…’ – an affinity suggested to Yeats by Dorothy Wellesley.²¹Close Ruddock continued to send Yeats her work after he made the selections for the Oxford anthology, but his estimation of Ruddock's newer verse was even less enthusiastic than the tepid praise in the anthology. Recuperating in Majorca from an illness and working with Shri Purohit Swami on an English version of the Upanishads, Yeats advised Ruddock to ‘Leave off verse for a time’ because it seemed she did not work at her technique, and ‘[w]hen your technic is sloppy your matter grows second‐hand – there is no difficulty to force you down under the surface – difficulty is our plough.’²²Close This advice seems to have reached Ruddock at a time when the emotional instability suggested in her letters was on the verge of deteriorating into a mental breakdown. Not having heard any response to the many poems she had sent Yeats, Ruddock presented herself in Majorca and, according to the account she later published under the title ‘Almost I Tasted Ecstasy’ in The Lemon Tree, ‘told Yeats that if I could not write a poem that would live I must die.’²³Close

As Yeats recalled in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, he ‘was amazed by the tragic magnificence of some fragment & said so.’²⁴Close He later described this material by saying ‘[h]ere in broken sentences, in ejaculations, in fragments of all kinds was a power of expression of spiritual suffering unique in her generation.’ (Lemon Tree xi) An excerpt from Yeats's catalogue of examples includes the fragment that gave rise to the title of Ruddock's account of her adventures in Majorca and Barcelona:

‘O Song, song harshened, I have leashed you to harshness.’…‘I will shut out all but myself and grind, grind myself down to the bone.’…‘Follow, follow lest that which you love vanishes, Let it go, let it go.’…‘Shape me to Eternal Damnation to rid me of the phlegm that spits itself from unbearable cold.’… ‘Bleed on, bleed on, soul, because I shall not cease to knife you until you are white and dry.’…‘Almost I tasted ecstasy and then came the Blare, and drowned perfection in perfection.’

Ruddock had a different view of her meeting with Yeats. As she saw it, Yeats questioned the punctuation of one of her poems, and she thought ‘“there should be a comma after fulfillment”, and that it meant I must die.’ (Ecstasy, LMR 93) She approached the ocean, but ‘could not go into the sea because there was so much in life I loved, then I was so happy at not having to die I danced.’ (Id.) The next day, as Yeats recounted to Wellesley, ‘she went to Barcelona & there went mad, climbing out of a window, falling through a barbers roof, breaking a kneecap, hiding in a ship's hold, singing her own poems most of the time.’ In this extreme state, Ruddock seemed to sense the age‐old equation between Muse and harlot, imagining that a voice (which could have been that of Simon's Helena) told her to ‘Make yourself a prostitute for me as I did for you.’ In search of lodging, she declared that ‘I am a prostitute, and outcast from all Nations, I wander without hope of death.’ (Ecstasy, LMR 94–5) Her essay closes with one of the poems she sang in Barcelona, a song of the ‘Sea‐starved, hungry sea’:

Sea‐starved, hungry sea,

In a stretched hand humility,

Lapped there in a dream stand

Shut eyes to the sea and sand

Knowing that the sea is there

Drink deep…O weeping cry…

O my love leaned a little from me. (Ecstasy, LMR 97)

Yeats did not hesitate to use these terrible events as part of the passionate life in which he would find the emotion necessary to inspiration. One of the resulting poems, ‘Sweet Dancer’ (1937), adds a poignant refrain to its narrative:

The girl goes dancing there

On the leaf‐sown, new‐mown, smooth

Grass plot of the garden;

Escaped from her bitter youth,

Escaped out of her crowd,

Or out of her black cloud.

Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!

If strange men come from the house

To lead her away do not say

That she is happy being crazy;

Lead them gently astray;

Let her finish her dance,

Let her finish her dance.

Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer! (VP 568)

‘A Crazed Girl’ (1936) moves beyond description to reimagine the experience in light of Yeats's long fascination with the dance as an image – one that, as Frank Kermode put it, ‘contain[ed] life in death, death in life, movement and stillness, action and contemplation, body and soul.’²⁵Close The Margot of ‘A Crazed Girl’ bears traces of Iseult Gonne dancing on the Normandy shore, and sings her own song to the sea‐starved, hungry sea. She is more Muse than Siren:

That crazed girl improvising her music,

Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself

Climbing, falling she knew not where,

Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,

Her knee‐cap broken, that girl I declare

A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing

Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred

She stood in desperate music wound,

Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph

Where the bales and the baskets lay

No common intelligible sound

But sang, ‘O sea‐starved, hungry sea.’ (VP 578)

This moving merger of Ruddock's and Yeats's lyric impulses suggests that both poets found inspiration in Ruddock's state of ecstasy. At the end of his introduction to The Lemon Tree, Yeats recognized the transient nature of ecstasy, observing that ‘[t]he mystic who has found or approached ecstasy, whether in the midst of order or disorder, must return into the life of the world to test or employ knowingly or unknowingly his new knowledge.’ (Lemon Tree xiv) He concluded by positing that Ruddock might return to the theatre ‘and forget amid the excitement of the Boards that more perilous excitement.’ (Id.) In fact, Ruddock appeared to recover almost immediately, and worked with Yeats in three of his 1937 BBC broadcasts, reading and sometimes singing his poems. (LMR 117)

Tragically, not long after the last of the broadcasts, her condition deteriorated and she was committed to an asylum, where she died in 1951 at the age of forty‐four. George Barnes, who had produced the BBC programs, recalled how greatly Yeats valued her ‘ability to pass naturally from speech to song’ (LMR 118), an ability that could not have failed to put Yeats in mind of Florence Farr. More fundamentally, Ruddock had reinvigorated Yeats's notion of the Muse and inspired his dramatic embodiment of the Muse concept in A Full Moon in March. Ruddock's Siren‐like Muse evoked desire rather than love. In an interesting letter of 11 August 1935, Yeats agrees with Ruddock that he also hates the word love and says that he has ‘I think avoided it.’ With an implicit nod to George's loyalty and devotion to a common interest in Yeats's work – his Ithaca – Yeats separates love from sexual pleasure:

[Love] is a name for the ephemeral charm of desire – desire for its own sake I do not think that is because I have grown old, that I value something more like friendship because founded on common interest, and think sexual pleasure an accessory, a needful one where it is possible. Paris and Helen were Romantic Lovers and both were probably fools; Odysseus returning to Penelope through ten years' heroic toil (though frequently unfaithful on the way), Penelope's patient waiting, was the classical ideal of man's and woman's wisdom. Both had Ithaca to think of. (CL InteLex 6316)

For the Yeats of 1935, he and Maud Gonne, like Paris and Helen, ‘were probably fools.’ What he needs now is George to help him focus on the Ithaca of his collected works, and Margot to stimulate the sexual desire essential to creation of still more poetry. She was thus both Siren and Muse. Moreover, her own poetry was in some ways an inspiration to Yeats. She showed him both the rewards and perils of mystic ecstasy, and her poem, ‘The Apple’ (Lemon Tree 17) may have pointed him toward that relentless paring away of the nonessential that dominated his last years:

O apple life

That swingeth where

My hand can pluck

Thee, poison fruit.

I'll peel thee down

Unto the core

Imperishable,

Absolute.

Ruddock retained her own distinct place in Yeats's pantheon. Near the close of his life, in ‘The Man and the Echo’ (1938), having asked the famous question whether his play Cathleen ni Houlihan had ‘sent out/ Certain men the English shot,’ Yeats wondered:

Did words of mine put too great strain

On that woman's reeling brain? (VP 632)

Shortly after he had first met Margot Ruddock, Yeats sailed close to another potential Siren, Ethel Mannin. Their encounter was no accident. Norman Haire not only performed the Steinach operation on Yeats, but introduced him to Mannin for the purpose of testing its efficacy, encouraging her to dress seductively for the occasion.²⁶Close Mannin was a prolific thirty‐four‐year‐old author whose exuberant Confessions and Impressions lauded Haire as ‘all contraception and rejuvenation and sex reform.’²⁷Close Her own membership in the World League for Sexual Reform, her affair with Bertrand Russell, and the confessedly ‘Hedonistic attitude toward life’ trumpeted in Confessions and Impressions brought Mannin to Yeats with a decidedly racy reputation.²⁸Close Beneath the reputation was an amazing story of achievement. As told in Confessions and Impressions, Mannin was born at Clapham, went to a board‐school, and at fifteen got a job as a shorthand typist at Charles Higham's advertising organization. She had been attracted to writing from an early age, discovered poetry at school, and was writing advertisements and running two magazines at age sixteen. The next year, she ‘was publishing my own stories, articles, verses, in a monthly magazine which Higham bought and left me to produce.’ (Confessions 55) She married and gave birth to a daughter at nineteen, and managed to write four books in the ensuing five years. (Id. 64–8) She never slackened her pace, producing over a hundred books before her death in 1984. Her books were enormously popular, widely reviewed and judiciously praised. For example, L.T. Hartley found the satire of her third novel, Sounding Brass, sharper than that of Aldous Huxley in Antic Hay.²⁹Close In sum, the woman Haire chose to test the efficacy of his operation was beautiful, passionate and accomplished.

Mannin wrote that Edmund Dulac ‘and probably other people’ considered her friendship with Yeats ‘a little odd in view of the wide disparity in our ideas, Yeats with his innate mysticism and I with my inveterate materialism.…’ (Privileged Spectator 80–1) But Yeats was ready to bridge the gap. As Mannin pointed out, ‘Yeats full of burgundy and racy reminiscence was Yeats released from the Celtic Twilight and treading the antic hay with abundant zest.’ (Id.)

Almost immediately after meeting Mannin, Yeats wrote a two‐line letter to Olivia Shakespear, at once revealing and mystifying: ‘Are you back? Wonderful things have happened. This is Bagdad. This is not London.’³⁰Close As Foster recounts,³¹Close on 27 December 1934, the same day as this letter, Yeats drafted a ‘theme for a poem’ which progresses from the verses already sent to Ruddock, but seems to have been inspired by Mannin, to whom Yeats wrote on 30 December 1934, confiding: ‘You are right, the knowledge that I am not unfit for love has brought me sanity & peace. Yet that is not altogether why I came from you with the fealing that I have been blessed.’³²Close The experience was clearly worth repeating: Yeats wrote Mannin a week later suggesting, with implicit, if ironic, homage to Dante's term for the pleasure conferred by his beloved's greeting,³³Close that ‘we make Friday night “a beatitude”.’³⁴Close While the hauntingly beautiful poem suggests that its author was ‘not unfit’ for love, he seems not entirely fit either: he suffered anxiety, his breath failed, his heart ached, and he took a ‘winding pathway’ to ‘Love's levelling bed’:

Port[r]ayed before his Eyes,

Implacably lipped,

It seemed that she moved;

It seemed that he clasped her knees

What man so worshipped

When Artemis roved?

He sat worn out & she

Kneeling seemed to him

Pitiably frail;

Loves anxiety

Made his eyes dim

Made his breath fail

Then suffered he heart ache;

Driven by Love's dread

Alternate will

A winding pathway took,

In Love's levelling bed

All gyres lie still.³⁵Close

The poem portrays Mannin as initially something of a marmorean Muse – she is ‘implacably lipped’ – but ultimately ‘she moved’ and found her way to ‘Love's levelling bed.’ Her status as Muse is signified by her association with Artemis, the Hellenic equivalent of Diana, who displaced Selene as the goddess of the moon. The Mannin‐inspired Artemis thus succeeds the Selene invoked by Farr on that long ago night in 1890 when Yeats watched her performance in Bedford Park. Any doubt that Yeats saw Mannin as a figure of the moon goddess is removed by his letter of 15 November 1936, in which he tells her ‘Mother Goddess, I put your hand to my lips.’³⁶Close

Yeats's relationship with the White Goddess, however, had changed markedly since he pursued her in the form of Olivia Shakespear and Florence Farr. In Per Amica Silentia Lunae, written after his summer conversations with Iseult Gonne and just prior to his marriage, he had concluded that his Muse, his creative element, hovered somewhere in his own psyche, linking his mind to the general mind. As of the time of Per Amica, the notion that his daimon was his own feminine aspect was cloaked in the allusive notion that there was some whispering in the dark between Daimon and sweetheart. (Myth 336) After his long experience with George's communicators, Yeats more concretely expressed his theory in the 1925 edition of A Vision, where he asserted that the mind is composed of masculine and feminine halves, with the ‘dark’ or non‐rational half – the source of creativity – being the opposite sex of the ‘light’ or rational side. (AVA 27) The masculine and feminine elements ‘face each other in a perpetual conflict or embrace.’ (Id.)

Thus schooled by his own speculations in Per Amica Silentia Lunae and his intensive interrogation of, and suggestion to, George's ghosts, Yeats was prepared to recognize that Mannin was at once his moon goddess – his Artemis – and a projection of an aspect of his own psyche. Accordingly, in a letter to her of 4 March 1935, he told her ‘[y]ou are doubly a woman, first because of yourself & secondly because of the muses whereas I am but once a woman.’³⁷Close Yeats's letter assumes that Mannin's Muse is female – rather than a masculine anti‐self – an erroneous assumption, unless Yeats was anticipating Gary Snyder's assertion that, in the Muse tradition, ‘[i]t is likely that men become creative when they touch the woman in themselves, and women become creative when they touch the woman in the man in themselves.’³⁸Close In any event, the letter to Mannin contains a fascinating insight into Yeats's thinking about his relationship with his Muse.

Yeats's real life experimentation with these ideas took a startling turn when, in June 1935, he met Dorothy Wellesley, one of the poets whose work he had been reading in preparation for editing the proposed Oxford anthology of modern verse. Yeats's relationship with Mannin continued until his death, but by the time he met Wellesley, Mannin had met her future husband, and Yeats's quest for beatitude propelled him along multiple parallel paths.