For John. Enjoy!
Aedh 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.
The original speaker of the poem, Aedh, is appropriately enough both a poet and a "God of death". Aedh was the old Gaelic God of death, one of the children of Lir, who used to charm souls away through his seductive harp music. Yeats seems to have used this character in some of his stories and describes him as fire reflected in water. In Yeats' volume of 1899, The Wind Amongst The Reeds, he represents Yeats' renunciation of the modern world and his desire for death in life and life and death - a pessimistic dualism.
Anthony Hopkins* reads this poem in the film 84 Charing Cross Road (Thank you, John!):
*Anthony Hopkins' mother, Muriel Hopkins (née Yeats), is a distant relative of William Butler Yeats.