Irish poet, 1865-1939.
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.
More about Yeats at http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/
Yay? That’s the only poem of his I’ve read.
Mind you, I do like it.
I’ve added a link to a page where you can read more.
Happy Birthday!!
ooh that is one of my favorite poems. “tread softly because you tread on my dreams”
Dreams. Cloth.
I like it, but I always found the imagery to be a little much. Oh well, I have a profoundly literal mind and profoundly little intelligence, so there you have it. It reminds me of Wodehouse talking about bunging people’s hearts at other people’s feets, so to speak. Feet, and walking, are very poetic things. Dancing is, too, but less so. I mean, dancing is more physically bracing, and poets are, on the whole, rather fragile people. This may be balanced in the fact that many poems are enduring pieces that last long after the creator is dead, such as in the case of Herr W. B. Yeats and this poem. It is not often that such a work stands for such a long length of time, and this I salute.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Yeats. May your royalties be many, your publishers humble, your inspiration prolific, and your descendants only mildly embarrassing.
I like that poem. : ) Happy birthday, Mr. Yeats!
8- Yes, dancing is definately poetic. it is almost like writing visual poetry.
Happy birthday!
8-Poetry is visual. Unless you read it aloud. I assume you were referring to my post with that ‘8’, because your post was ‘8’.
um who is this poet?
never heard of im
Wow, I like that poem. Very fairy-ish.
He wrote several poems about dancing and dancers. Here’s one called “Sweet Dancer”:
The girl goes dancing there
On the leaf-sown, new-mown, smooth
Grass plot of the garden;
Escaped from bitter youth,
Escaped out of her crowd,
Or out of her black cloud.
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!
If strange men come from the house
To lead her away, do not say
That she is happy being crazy;
Lead them gently astray;
Let her finish her dance,
Let her finish her dance.
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!
And here’s a verse from another poem. Here, “she” is Helen of Troy:
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
My dad told me it was Yeat’s birthday and read me that poem, and then I come on here and here it is. Cool. I love the last line of the poem.
Reading poetry is a mental excersise. It’s like a puzzle sometimes, trying to fit the words together to see what the poet is saying.
The poem about the girls who is dancing reminds me of something. Just being aloud to do what you would like, without adults expecting things of you. Being happy, being crazy. I think he captures that in the poem.
The poem about Helen is trickier. Helen seems to be wanting to be less a princess and more a child, dancing a street dance, maybe? I’m not sure that I have this right.
I love Yeats!!!!! He captures so many of my emotions and feelings in his poems.
Have you read To A Child Dancing in the Wind?
In another poem of his I like, that the refrain-thing goes:
go away oh human child,
to the waters and the wild,
with a fairy, hand in hand
for the world’s more full of weeping,
than you can understand,
There is another one about an island, that I really like, but i can’t remember how to spell the name of it.
Yeats was Irish. I went to a place where he lived once, in Ireland. It was like a little castle-museum type thingy. I dunno, I was, like, five. I thought I was cool.
The island is called Innisfree. I’m pretty sure that poem is on the Yeats site whose URL I listed; it’s one of his most famous.
I’ve been making my way through the poems on his site. He is very Muse-worthy. Huzzah for Mr Yeats!
SN (14),
I think the poem shows Helen before she married Menelaus and long before she met Paris, while she was still learning to become the person for whom the Greeks waged the nine-year war that destroyed Troy.
The verse about Helen is sandwiched between a verse about Caesar (not clear which one) in his tent planning a military campaign, and a verse about Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel–men whose different kinds of genius are about to change history. Each verse ends with the refrain about his/her mind moving upon silence. Helen seems an odd fit between those two; her still-developing genius seems to be for charm and desirability. (Yeats had fairly traditional notions of the role of women.)
(18) I see. Well, at least, I think I see. It makes more sense now. I think I would understand it even better if I read more Yeats and more about Helen of Troy. I like the line “Move most gently if move you must”, because of the alliteration.
Thanks for explainging it, though.
I’m going to the library today. I’ll check out some Yeats.
Hey, so something cool happened at the library. I looked for a book on Yeats, but I was sort of in the wrong place for poetry, so they didn’t have any. I was wandering around aimlessly, and completely randomly, I pick a book off the shelf. The Origin of Knowledge and Imagination by Bronowski. It’s a book and philosophy, and turned out to be really interesting, but here’s the cool part- the book starts out with the aurthor quoting a poem by Yeats!
For Anne Gregory
“Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’
“But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’
“I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.”
I like this one a lot, partially because it’s easier to understand, and it has a point about the connection of visual things to emotions.
Woah. That’s what you call a coincidence, if nothing else is! I must go read this Yeats person, but maybe when I haven’t just gotten home from a swim meet. Translation: when my brain is functioning!
In the English final, we had to write somthing to do with some quotes that we had to choose off a sheet, and there was a quote said by Yeats! I used it, oviously.
enwrought???? ah well.