“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.”

—jim dywer, july 20 NY Times