Mr. and Mrs. Yeats (Louis Simpson)

“The common condition
of our life,” Yeats said,
“is hatred.”

You might think as he did
if you loved a woman
who never would love you,
an angry, shouting woman,
a woman like Maud Gonne.

And if instead of love,
you had “theater business,”
and your better moments
were at the club, “exchanging
polite meaningless words.”

But then, suppose you met
a woman, oddly named,
who had a kinder face.
George helped him understand
the phases of the moon.

She talked to the great dead
in automatic writing.
Yeats and his wife together
went up a winding stair
that leads ... I don’t know where.

(It wasn’t a religion,
Yeats despised religion.)
The point is, he discovered
the common life of man
and woman could be kind.

And if it wasn’t love,
as love is in the movies,
they didn’t seem to mind.

(From The Hudson Review, Vol. LVII, No. 2, Summer 2004)