W.B. Yeats, ‘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.
About the author…
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet and playwright. He was a central figure in the Irish Literary Revival and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
To Read Alongside…
W.H. Auden’s moving tribute ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ crystalizes Yeats’s achievements over his long career and also reflects on the essence of poetry itself in lines that are still being debated today:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
You can read Auden’s poem in full here
And an earlier LitHits newsletter on Yeats is available here
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