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Similarly, one may find many kinships between one of Freud’s earlier essays, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming” (1908), and Yeats’s admitted methods of composition. Yeats believed, like Blake, that the world of dreams possessed a reality of its ownвЂ"perhaps more genuine than the objective world of workaday reality. We know that Yeats deliberately attempted to suspend his conscious faculties to make himself more susceptible to the “subconscious.” Wish-fulfillment, Freud believed, is the major theme of fantasies. He believed that man’s dreams tend to be ambitious, women’s erotic, but that both kinds of fantasies are often united. Many men have performed their ambitious deeds for a woman, “at whose feet” they lay their “triumphs.” Thus, the literary psychologist may search for such a generative force in Yeats poetry as Maud Gonne, the beautiful woman whom he loved deeply and long, even turning to political activity, at least partly to win her praise. She was the inspiration of many of his poems. A sketch of her history has already been treated in a sociocultural context, including her identification with the “Rose” poems and the play The Countess Cathleen (1892). But Yeats alluded to her as late as 1939 in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in which a “Lion and woman” image appears, along with an “embittered heart” and a first-person reference to

I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride ?

And then a counter truth filled out its play,

The Countess Cathleen was the name I gave it;

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

Here we have, then, early and late artistic productions inspired by Maud Gonne or, at least, alluding to her. Applying another Freudian principleвЂ"wish-fulfillmentвЂ"the literary psychologist may see an application to “The Second Coming” of past, present, and future “threaded as it were, on the string of the wish that runs through them all.” Recapitulating Yeats’s circumstances just prior to the composition of “The Second Coming” in 1919, one may see something of the “present” out of which the poem emerged. Though we cannot know all of Yeats’s actual movements and motivations at the time, we may well know enough to see a tension between his ego and libido-object. The literary psychologist would see Maud Gonne as the “woman in some corner of the picture,” to use Freud’s term.

Thus, the background of his long romance with Maud Gonne and related matters would be pertinent source materials for a psychological study of the poem. The conditions surrounding its composition extended far back in time. He had met the famed beauty in Dublin in 1888 when he was twenty-three, and in 1919, when he was fifty-four, he published these lines in The Wild Swans at Coole:

Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath

When you are passing.

He first proposed to her in 1891 in Dublin. Caught up in violent anti-English hatred and Irish movements for nationalism, she desired Yeats’s friendship, and for a time she converted him into a kind of political activist, although he could not share her radical views. Much to his disappointment, she married, in 1903, John MacBrideвЂ"an Irish hero against the English in the Boer War. Yeats thought the marriage a poor match, and although she later separated from MacBride, her Roman Catholic faith would not permit her to divorce him and marry Yeats, even if she had wanted to. After MacBride’s execution in 1916, Yeats went to Normandy, where Maud was living out of the range of English authority, and there, he proposed again. She refused. Then, strangely, Yeats found himself falling in love with Maud’s attractive young daughter by adoption, Iseult. The next year, in 1917, after receiving Maud’s permission, he proposed to Iseult, who (as Maud had warned him she might) had difficulty making up her mind. Even so, Yeats managed to get the family back to England, but he could not secure clearance from the authorities for Maud to return to Ireland. In September 1917, Yeats experienced a crisis on the boat when Iseult would not make her decision. The strain was nearly too much for a bachelor in his fifties who was about to change his whole way of life. But marriage he was determined upon. He informed Iseult he knew another lovely girl who would marry him, and the next month, in October 1917, he did marry Miss Hyde-Lees. Yeats’s feverish quest for marriage may suggest, on a broad level, a search for some kind of stability, or for love and wisdom, but its frantic circumstances indicate a desperate grasping for order within a life of chaos. In psychological terms, this would indicate a loss of ego control and an anarchy of the libido, which must have always been especially strong in Yeats.

If we accept Freud’s thesis of an event of the present making “a strong impression on the writer,” it would seem that Maud Gonne’s “Second coming” into Yeats’s life would have been a sufficient causal agent to have “stirred up a memory of an earlier experience.” If Yeats’s had indeed retreated far enough into his old memories, he may have stirred up a sexual fantasy for the Maud Gonne about whom, projecting his ego outward, he had often dreamed, and he may have then transmitted those dreams into poetry.

Within such a Freudian context, several images in “The Second Coming” take on sexual overtones. For example, the title may indicate, on one level, a significant “second” meeting, or on another, sexual orgasm; line 1, possibly, sexual intercourse; line 2, the lack of personal control or mastery of the ego over powerful unconscious desires; lines 3-5, a freely associated identity with the disintegrating