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.*
Those of you who write your own poetry probably know the feeling: when you stumble upon a poem which strikes you as so perfect, so beautiful in its simplicity, and so mind-bogglingly eye-opening that you become envious of the poet who dared to create such a piece of paradise on earth.
I got this feeling for the first time when reading Yeats’s ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ (originally ‘Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’). Although it isn’t generally considered one of his best work – not that that says much, considering Yeats is often thought to be one of the giants of poetry – it is almost certainly one of his most well-known and much-beloved poems.
And how could this not be the case? The language is straight-forward and simple; the diction is modern and can be read easily by anyone, even if you haven’t studied literature at school or university; the prosody is a simple, but loose iambic tetrameter; the resonances of the repetitions at the line endings carry the poem onwards; and the message is so ordinary, yet gorgeous, that one can’t help but love it as it is.
The poem starts out with a desire most, if not all of us, have dreamt of at some point of our lives: to be rich, to have access to all the beautiful things humans have come up with throughout the ages:
Had I the heaven’s 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
These are the aspects of humanity which reach god-like potential; they are beautiful to behold and so wonderful that one might mistake them for heavenly cloths. In this sublime state, they contain all aspects of human existence – they are the cloths of ‘night and light and the half-light’; that is, they are the cloths of enlightened daytime, melancholic night-time, as well as the mysterious time in-between, the golden twilight. The repetitions of ‘cloths’ and ‘light’ gives us a sense of the urgency of the desire; the speaker is yearning for the possession of these things. But as we discover afterward, our speaker is not selfishly dreaming of possessing riches for him or herself, but, on the contrary, to provide a nameless lover with them:
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
The only reason the speaker wishes to possess the riches is so that he can ‘spread the cloths’ under the feet of the lover; not merely to provide them as a gift, but literally to allow the lover to walk upon the spoils of the speaker’s endeavours – in other words, to give the lover the feeling that he/she is walking upon something so wonderful that it reminds him/her of heaven. But, alas, the speaker doesn’t have these riches:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
The speaker concedes that he/she can only dream of this possibility, only dream of being able to lift the lover to a heaven-like state. And yet, the speaker has spread his/her dreams under the feet of the lover, as though the dreams possess the same qualities as the cloths. Rather than giving the lover the spoils of riches, the speaker has given him/her the same desires, the same dreams, the same wishes that allowed the speaker to conjure up these images in the first place. This spreading of the desire for riches – for heavenly transcendence – is, however, a particularly delicate act, putting the speaker at risk, as we see can see in the final line:
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Having revealed his/her deepest desires, the speaker is in a profoundly vulnerable position. The speaker is at the mercy of the lover because the lover now knows the deepest driving-force in the speaker’s life – the reason the speaker lives for, so to speak. This is a vote of confidence in the lover, but also demonstrates the deep longing the speaker has for him/her.
It is astonishing how much Yeats manages to put into these eight lines. He gives us love and melancholy, poverty and riches, wishes and dreams, the pain of unfulfilled desire, and the vulnerability of confessions. It is a poem which not only convinced me of Yeats’s genius when first reading it but was actually one of the poems which awoke in me my love for poetry. An astonishing accomplishment, even by Yeats’s standard.
A lovely recording of the great Sir Anthony Hopkins reading the poem:
If you enjoyed reading this post, please feel free to leave a comment or share it on social media by clicking on one of the tender buttons below.
