I’m coming to the end of the final edits of ‘A Crowd of Stars: WB Yeats Poems to Maud Gonne with Commentary by the Muse’

This book was offered as a Kickstarter bonus if our statue campaign for Maud Gonne managed to cross our stretch goal of target £15,000. We did… and so I’ve spent the past few months knee-deep in references and footnotes.

Not really my happy place but I’m glad I did it. My novel series about them makes leaps of imagination… as it must. So it’s good to also have a book that sticks to the ‘facts’… in so far as they can be known.

I thought you might like to read the Yeats poem from which I took the title of this book: ‘When You Are Old’

You’ll see it there in the last line. It has a particular meaning that I’ll share with you soon.

For now, enjoy this sonnet.

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.