Aedh Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven and the World of W. B. Yeats

Meri Utkovska
Jan 5, 2024
6 min read

Updated: Jan 16

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.

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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 the 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 the 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 practised 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 more 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.

Essential Books by William Butler Yeats

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

(paperback)

Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorised by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, occasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to sombre and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work, we can trace the quest of this century's greatest poet to unite intellect and artistry in a single magnificent vision.

Revised and corrected, this edition includes Yeats's own notes on his poetry, complemented by explanatory notes from esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world's most beloved poets available in paperback.

Product Details

Publisher: Scribner

Publish Date: September 09, 1996

Pages: 576

Language: English

TypeBook: Paperback

EAN/UPC: 9780684807317

Dimensions: 214.3 X 139.7 X 35.6 mm | 684.9 g

BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry, Poetry

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Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

The first edition of W. B. Yeats's The Tower appeared in bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a bestseller.

Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems ("Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children", among them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire Yeats canon. As Virginia Woolf declared in her unsigned review of this collection, "Mr Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately."

Product Details

Publisher: Scribner

Publish Date: January 20, 2004

Pages: 160

Language: English

TypeBook: Paperback

EAN/UPC: 9780743247283

Dimensions: 190.5 X 130.2 X 12.7 mm | 131.5 g

BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry, Poetry

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Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

A stunning facsimile of the 1919 first edition of William Butler Yeats’s The Wild Swans at Coole: an elegant volume showcasing these poems as they would have first been read and a complement to facsimile editions The Winding Stair and The Tower.

Published in 1919 during W.B. Yeats’s “middle stage” and composed of poems written during World War I, The Wild Swans at Coole is contemplative and elegiac. This collection captures Yeats at a time when he was looking back on his life, coming to terms with the realities of modern war, reflecting on lost love, and defining his place in the world as a poet. It features forty poems, among them “The Fisherman,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” and “On Being Asked for a War Poem.”

This facsimile of the original 1919 edition presents the reader with the work in its original form, with handsome old-fashioned type, how readers and Yeats himself would have seen it in the early twentieth century. A great gift book and collector’s item, The Wild Swans at Coole also includes an Introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar George Bornstein.

Product Details

Publisher: Scribner

Publish Date: March 07, 2017

Pages: 176

Language: English

TypeBook: Paperback

EAN/UPC: 9781501106040

Dimensions: 190.5 X 127.0 X 15.2 mm | 154.2 g

BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry, Poetry

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