The Gift of Harun Al-Raschid
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The Gift of Harun Al-Raschid, written in 1923,
The poem was presented in a form of a letter from
Inspiration
Many believe that The Gift of Harun Al-Raschid was inspired by Yeats' marriage and, specifically, served as an ode to the kind of love that he shared with his wife Georgie Hyde Lees also known as George. For context, one can turn to Yeats' years of obsessive infatuation with Maude Gonne, an English heiress who rejected his marriage proposal three times. She became his muse and the subject of several of his poems written within a span of at least 20 years. When the poet finally ended his ties with Gonne, he proposed marriage to Lees in 1917 and was accepted. The marriage was surprisingly successful despite the 27-year age gap. The poem extolled the ideal love that blossomed from the marriage for it involved the union of two souls. In the poem, Yeats referred to George as a gift who came to him "unknown and unloved" but became the woman who "can shake more blossom from autumnal chill than all my bursting springtime knew."[3]
Aside from serving as a metaphor for his marriage and his vision of love, Yeats also loosely borrowed from the fiction of
References
- ISBN 978-1-136-47227-5.
- ISBN 978-1-4165-9373-7.
- ISBN 978-1-909254-35-0.
- ISBN 978-0-8160-5895-2.