"What about William?" The query had been posed by the wife of William Butler Yeats, years after his death, to Maud Gonne, the woman to whom William had proposed numerous times over twenty years before he surrendered to rejection and married Georgie Hyde-Lees. This was not a simple love triangle and it was not even the tragedy of love that drove Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to fate-stained suicide upon one another's breast. This was a Hermetic triad of accidental proportion, fulfilling W.B. Yeats' own prediction of being thrown into "the frog spawn of a blind man's ditch," a "fecund ditch" of a world. Maud Gonne tells us the forty-year story in a flashback of memories, treading carefully through the years and Yeats' poetry to find the answer that would satisfy and relieve Georgie's jealousy while being honest to the memory of W.B. Yeats. Maud could not allow William, whom she dubbed "William Softly," to love her, but she had to face and ultimately justify why that should be so. In the process, Maud makes discoveries about her troubled life that should have led her to entirely different conclusions. "Tread softly," William said, "because you tread on my dreams."
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