“Worst Part of Life”: Yeats’s Horoscopes for Olivia Shakespear

Abstract

In Yeats’s Golden Dawn George Mills Harper quotes “a most revealing note in Yeats’s hand: `1900 — from April till February 1901 ”worst part of life“. Both in regard to ♀ matters & other things.’ ” Because of his interest in the Golden Dawn troubles of 1900, Harper interprets this note as referring not to Yeats’s frustrated love for Maud Gonne — “♀ [Venus] matters” — but to the Order of the Golden Dawn, “[s] ince Venus occupies a central position in the symbolism and ritual of the Golden Dawn”.¹ Two things must strike the reader as odd. First, Yeats’s use of quotation marks around the key phrase, and second, the apparent contradiction of Memoirs which suggests that for Yeats the period 1897–98 was the worst period of life (Mem 125). An examination of a scrap of paper in the collection of Michael Butler Yeats provides the solution.