Treading softly: Poem of the Week/Number One

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

Just over a month ago I posted a poem on Facebook for Valentines Day.  It wasn’t my poem and I had gone to no great trouble to seek it out, in fact I pinched Wendy Cope’s beautiful If We Were Never Going to Die off the front page of the Guardian. To my surprise within a very short time I had clocked up a lot of Likes.

No, I’m not going to embarrass myself by going back to count how many.  This was not Fenton the Dog on YouTube.  It was something much better, real friends saying how moved they were by the poem, sharing it with other friends.  At the end of the day my friend Celia suggested I should post a poem a day.

Yeats by Alice Boughton, with thanks to Wikimedia Commons

It’s a lovely idea. I know I could not keep that up, but I might manage a poem a week. At any rate I am going to give it a try.  Starting on St Patrick’s Day, I decided to choose an Irish poet and by an almost eerie chance my volume of Poems on the Underground fell open at He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by WB Yeats. Again the poem was liked and shared by a surprising number of friends. The experiment continues.

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.

Why I chose this poem

The last three lines have always moved me but Yeats has other personal significance. A long time ago, when I was a teenage schoolgirl attending Sligo Grammar and High School,  I went for Sunday walks with friends round Loch Gill with the Lake Isle of Innisfree reflected in the water.

We knew that Yeats had a connection with the place and I wish I could say we were reading his poetry at the time but we were much more interested in the Beatles – it was a very long time ago – and, oddly, I do not remember Yeats being taught at Sligo.

Perhaps it’s not so odd. Sligo Grammar and High was/is a Protestant school, and Yeats, though part of the Anglo-Irish Protestant landed gentry, was a passionate Republican.  At any rate, as far as our English class was concerned, poetry was mostly the preserve of English Romantics like Shelley and Keats.  Which means I can quote by heart a good chunk of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind but must read Yeats from a book.

There’s a personal footnote, so to speak.  For more than 30 years,  we were lucky enough to live next door to William Kirk, the talented Edinburgh silversmith. Sometimes, early in the morning, we could hear him through the walls, tapping sheets of silver into exquisite bowls and plates. Sometimes he was cutting strong, handsome letters into slate and stone. Sadly he died almost five years ago, but we are proud possessors of a slab of stone with an engraving by Bill which says: Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

An interesting note on copyright: Yeats’ works are now freely available online. Copyright lasts the length of the author’s life plus 70 years after death. Since Yeats died in 1939 copyright expired at midnight on New Years Eve 2009.