In the autumn of 1917, after years of frustration in both romantic and religious questing, Yeats found a good measure of fulfillment in both realms. He gave up hope of marrying either Maud Gonne MacBride, the woman whom he had desired, of whom he had despaired, and about whom he had made love poetry for decades, or her daughter Iseult Gonne, the subject of a messy emotional interlude that had begun the previous year. A quick turn led Yeats to Georgie, or George, Hyde Lees, a young member of his English set, who had been interested when the poet had approached her several years earlier, and she now returned the attention. The two were well matched in intelligence and strength of will, as well as artistic and spiritual inclinations, though the age diff erence was sharp. By 1917, she was ready to commitherself to a risky chance at happiness with a husband who seemed challenging enough to suit; he was convinced that an annus mirabilis was in his stars, if he could but grasp it. They both may have been right: as it happened, challenge, revelation, and a measure of happiness were both finally at hand.

After initial difficulties that threatened to destroy the new marriage along with the psychic well-being of both partners, by the end of the year all seemed thrillingly well. The turn came in the midst of a traumatic honeymoon, when Yeats was physically ill and near emotional breakdown, caused in large part by the sense thathe had made a potentially ruinous mistake. During the crisis, George Yeats tried and succeeded in producing automatic writing, a type of mediumship well known in spiritualist circles, in which the writer touches a pen to a sheet of paper and empties her mind as if she were engaging in formal meditation. Inexplicably, sometimes the pen moves. This is the moment of mystery, the moment that, in retrospect as well as on the immediate occasion, may provoke either ridicule or true belief. It has done both as the tale of the automatic writing has been told and retold in Yeats studies.