AEDH WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN by William Butler Yeats

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.

This poem is in the public domain.

About William Butler Yeats

Widely considered as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats was born on June 13th, 1865, in Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland. He was the son of well-known painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen. Yeats spent his childhood in County Sligo and in London, but returned to Ireland when he was fourteen. He later became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period. 

Yeats’s writing drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore, regardless of the fact that he never did learn Irish Gaelic himself. Another great influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, and fell in love with.

Fellow poet W.H. Auden noted in a 1948 Kenyon Review essay entitled “Yeats as an Example,”  that Yeats accepted the modern necessity of having to make a lonely and deliberate

“choice of the principles and presuppositions in terms of which [made] sense of his experience.”

He went on to say that Yeats has written

“some of the most beautiful poetry” of modern times. 

John O'Leary and Irish Books, Music and Ballads

Yeats’ poetry was first published in 1885, in the Dublin University Review. That same year, he also met John O’Leary. O’Leary was a famous patriot who had returned to Ireland after 20 years of imprisonment and exile for revolutionary nationalistic activities, and was very keen on Irish music, ballads, and books. Encouraged by O’Leary, Yeats began to write poetry based on many Irish ballads, legends, and songs.

In a note included in the 1908 volume Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, he notes:

“When I first wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of romance, but presently I convinced myself ... that I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to that conviction to the end.”

The Golden Dawn and Romantic Poets

Interested in occultism and spiritualism, Yeats became a member of Golden Dawn, a secret society that practiced ritual magic in 1890. Although he remained a member of the Dawn for 32 years, its emphasis on the supernatural seemed to clash with his need as a poet for interaction in the physical world. Thus, in his public life, Yeats tried to follow in the footsteps of Romantic poet John Keats, who, in comparison to Romantic poets Shelley and Blake, remained close to the materials of life.  

Even though Yeats’s visionary and idealist interests were, in spite of his efforts to keep close to Keats, much closely aligned with the occult, Shelley and Blake, most of his poetry, however, used symbols from familiar traditions and ordinary life.

After 1910, his work became more modern in its imagery and concision, having been produced under the influence of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms.

Yeats's Legacy and Nobel Prize for Literature

Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as a major playwright (being one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), an important cultural leader,  and as one of the greatest poets in any language of the twentieth century.

William Butler Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

He died on January 28, 1939, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France.

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