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.
For context, one can turn to Yeats' years of obsessive infatuation with Maud Gonne, an English heiress who rejected his marriage proposal three times.
In the poem, Yeats referred to Georgie 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 The Arabian Nights to articulate his fascination for the desert culture of the Middle East as well as the occult.
The poet has been vocal about his affection for the Arabian Nights, placing the 1923 J. C. Mardrus–Edward Powys Mathers' translation of the text second to Shakespeare among all the works that most moved him.