Material Union Poem by gershon hepner

Material union, Maud declared,
in letters that they synchronized,
was just a shadow when compared
to correspondence harmonized.
This may be what led Yeats to say
that since she could this way arouse
desire, she should let him stay
with her forever as her spouse,
but she refused, for she preferred
of someone else to be the bride.
Yet when she saw this was absurd,
she left the Major, John MacBride,
and finally let J.B. Yeats
take her materially for just
a few brief months, when in their dates
they consummated Yeats’s lust.
She wouldn’t let him marry her
young daughter, who was twenty-two,
Iseult: droit de seigneur
did not enable him to woo
the mother or the daughter, so
he married Miss Georgina Lees,
whom he called George. She let him go
with any woman he might please,
and when he died Georgina and
his latest lover both stood vigil
by his deathbed, his demand
for other women not vestigial
until the moment that he died,
though no one ever could replace
Maud Gonne, with whom he synchronized
a love beyond all time and place,
util it morphed and moralized.

Inspired by an article by Jim Dwyer on an exhibition of the notebooks of William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne in Dublin (“Yeats Meets the Digital Age, Full of Passionate Intensity, ” NYT, July 20,2008) :
Until nearly the end of his days he and Gonne kept an eye on each other. In 1938 he wrote “A Bronze Head” about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a “dark tomb-haunter, ” so transformed from the light, gentle woman of his memory. Almost from the beginning she had been a figure of memory. In the opening pages of the 1908 notebook he looked backward: “She said something that blotted away the recent past & brought all back to the spiritual marriage of 1898. She believed that this bond is to be recreated & to be the means of spiritual illumination between us. It is to be a bond of the spirit only.” Flipping ahead in the digital pages, one lands on Yeats’s July 26 entry and learns that he too had relished the astral meeting that Gonne would chronicle so ecstatically. “Noticed also that for the first time for weeks, ” he wrote, “physical desire was awakened.” When her letter arrived, he would learn they were not quite synchronized. “Material union is but a pale shadow compared to it, ” she wrote. “Write to me quickly & tell me if you know anything of this.” Yeats knew it well.


7/20/08