Of night and light and the half light

Here is Yeats, circa 1899: “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.

It was the last line that got me first. In my swoony youth, it was just the line to take my fancy. Coming back to it in maturity, it seems less romantic. It’s one thing to throw your dreams under her feet, another to tell her: watch your step! Like other gestures of art or love, there’s ego in it. But something about this poem still captures me, in spite of its confused meter and identical rhyme. Something about the third and fourth lines that feels less contrived and striven for, a more pure expression of wonder. ‘Blue’ and ‘dim’ and ‘dark’ give you deep night skies in a way ‘embroidered cloths’ never can. The overwrought first two lines, with their stilted syntax, stock conceit, and dactylic lurch, here give way to a slower, more halting rhythm, and to evocative words that echo each other. Short words that follow each other just the way lights might blink and flash: ‘night and light and the half light.’ Here, the poet looks up. The poem becomes about the light itself and not his own gesture. Then he seems to descend again to ego and cliché.

For all that, it is a romantic poem. It glows with light — he does bring the heavens to her, after all. It ends in intimacy — ‘tread softly’ is a whisper. And the three ‘dreams’ of the last three lines sound like bells, or like an incantation. It’s swoony, but its spell is real. C.S. Lewis wrote: “This is one of the miracles of love: it gives a power of seeing through its enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.” You can see how the spell works and still fall under it. Thus is love like poetry. And poetry like this is like love.