He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats
This is my favourite poem. I have
known it off by heart for years now; of all poems, this is surely the
most beautiful to carry around in the heart always. Resisting the
temptation to write a long, dry analysis that no one would enjoy, I
am just going to highlight a few of the things that I think make it
great.
I adore it for its simple expression of
the vulnerability assumed by a lover when declaring his feelings, and
by a poet when laying himself bare at the foot of the reader. The
poem evokes both the grand ambitions and the feelings of inadequacy
experienced as a lover and artist; the grand ambitions presented with
the richly lyrical, flowing first five lines and the powerful
extended metaphor of the sky as 'embroidered cloths'. This opulence
of language reverts to a gorgeous simplicity in the final few lines;
the paucity of language (repetition, no adjectives) a reflection of
the poet/lover's inadequacy.
The chosen rhyme-scheme of tight
quatrains (ABABCDCD and so on) mirrors the weaving of a cloth (I
don't know the technical term for rhyming a word with itself and
google was not at all forthcoming, but the unforced way it is
employed here is a tiny bit marvellous). The form also leads the
reader to expect a traditional Shakespearean love sonnet; falling
away after line eight serves to further our impression of the
speaker's uncertainty, unable even to offer a full sonnet.
The fragility, the defiance of
traditional forms, the doubts, and so on, all strike me as
proleptically modernist in the very best sense. Yeats' confident
manipulation of language perfectly presents the lack of confidence of
a lover, a poet and, eventually, of an entire age. Gorgeous.
