Yeats, Verily

Dear Sir -

Here is my offering, as you requested. It might come as some source of disappointment to learn the which of my favorite, as one could deem it too easy, obvious or girleen.* If memory serves, someone of your disposition might rather prefer, say, a maritime theme, as in The Shadowy Depths.

I am fond of A Prayer for My Daughter, though some of the latter might give cause to those who insist on William Butler's "woman problem," and old Thomas Stearns Eliot's an anti-Semite, and "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo," the homosexual. And what of it? Is an artist's merit in the life or the work? Neither, as they aren't really separable, and surely attitude and bias inform philosophy, which is present in art. So that must be attended to by a scrupulous reader. But as we discover beauty within the imperfect environment that is its setting, we must remember contrasts that offset and augment. We must remember that it is the very nature of the fragile human, and call it even more beautiful still.

Additionally, I care for The Stolen Child, among others. But truly, my simple favorite is what follows on this page and in the nature of my fool's heart. Just you be glad I didn't choose, When You Are Old.

Aedh Wishes For The Clothes 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.

-W.B. Yeats

I love it for the sentiment, for the love of the feeling world over the material one. I love the rhyming of the word with the same word, which seems like the self meeting the self through the other self, which is so much like falling in and making love. I love the hypnotic induction brought on by the meter, the aforementioned rhyme scheme, and the repetition of words, interspersed and creating internal rhyme and all the more hypnosis which, is so much like falling in and making love.


*(I am shocked not to find this word in the dictionary, though I learned it some time ago, I am quite convinced, from within the pages of the famed synesthete's,(Nabokov), sin, his soul, Lolita. I think it's simply Irish for "girlish.")
** (This poem is alternately called, "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven." If someone can give me an accurate and relevant meaning of Aedh, I would appreciate it.)