Explain The Name

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.