The Full Text of “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
1Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
2Enwrought with golden and silver light,
3The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
4Of night and light and the half-light,
5I would spread the cloths under your feet:
6But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
7I have spread my dreams under your feet;
8Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The Full Text of “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
1Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
2Enwrought with golden and silver light,
3The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
4Of night and light and the half-light,
5I would spread the cloths under your feet:
6But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
7I have spread my dreams under your feet;
8Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” Introduction
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"He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" is one of Irish poet W. B. Yeats's most famous works. In this short poem, a lover wishes that he could spread the "heavens' embroidered cloths" out at his beloved's feet, and he regrets that he can only offer her his "dreams" to walk over instead—dreams upon which he begs her to "tread softly," lest she rip them to shreds. Love, this short but powerful poem suggests, can feel at once transcendently beautiful and perilous. Yeats published the poem in his third collection, The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). It was inspired by his love for Maud Gonne, the Irish actress who would become Yeats's muse but did not return his romantic affections.
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“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” Summary
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If I had the embroidered cloths of the skies, richly decorated with gold and silver light—the blue, dusky, and dark cloths of the nighttime, the daytime, and the twilight—I would spread these cloths out so that you could walk over them. But since I'm poor, I only have my dreams to offer you. I've spread my dreams out beneath your feet. Step carefully, because you're walking on my dreams.
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“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” Themes
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The Glory and Vulnerability of Love
“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is a poem about the thrilling glory and frightening vulnerability that accompany love. This poem's speaker laments that he can’t give his beloved the astonishing gift he longs to offer her: the “heavens’ embroidered cloths,” or the fabric of the skies themselves. He wishes he could lay these beautiful fabrics, "embroidered" with the light of the sun and stars, beneath his beloved's “feet,” like a nobleman throwing his cape over a puddle or a servant rolling out a plush carpet.
This grand, imaginative vision conveys just how urgent the speaker's desires are. It also suggests that the speaker sees his beloved as higher than the heavens; in his eyes, she’s like a goddess, worthy of walking over the skies themselves. His love for this woman makes her seem exalted and powerful—and far above him. Indeed, by contrast, the speaker is merely a “poor” mortal. And, "being poor," he has no heavenly cloths to offer. Instead, he can only lay out his “dreams” for her to walk over—a humbler gift, yet also an intimate one.
He thus begs his beloved: “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” This final call to “tread softly” reflects the fact that the speaker's feelings make him terribly vulnerable. His love gives the lady goddess-like power, and part of that power is the power to kick his delicate dreams of love into the dust if she so chooses!
Love thus comes across here as both a beautiful and a terrible force. The speaker’s vision of what he wants to give his beloved suggests that love can make ordinary mortals seem like gods and goddesses. But his plea to his beloved to “tread softly” on his dreams is a reminder that love also makes people feel all too humanly vulnerable.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
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Lines 1-4
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,The poem begins with a description of the "cloths of Heaven." These cloths are the skies themselves, transformed into a blanket or tapestry. They are “enwrought with golden and silver light,” or elaborately embroidered with the golden light of the sun and the silver light of moon and stars.
The speaker (the nameless “he” of the title, though Yeats named him "Aedh"—pronounced "Ed"—in his earliest version of the poem) says that he would want a cloth for every quality and state of the sky: a “blue” cloth for the daytime, a “dim” cloth for dawn and dusk, a “dark” cloth for the night. The sparing imagery here allows the reader to envision all sorts of things:
- A “blue” cloth of daylight might contain all sorts of blues: the robin’s-egg blue of a spring day, the bleached blue of a hot day, the white-blue of an icy day.
- The “dim” cloth of the “half-light” might equally suggest misty dawn or moody twilight.
- And the “dark” can be many colors, from midnight blue to velvet black.
The rhythms and repetitions of these lines help shape the poem’s solemn beauty. The alternating identical rhymes on “cloths” and “light” draw readers back to those two central images and even interweave them, to follow the metaphor of sky-as-cloth: the cloths are made of lights, the lights become the cloths.
Meanwhile, the swinging polysyndeton in lines 3-4 (“The blue and the dim and the dark cloths”) creates a sense of abundance, layering one cloth atop the other. That effect feels all the more potent because of the way Yeats arranges the words within these lines:
- The descriptive adjectives in line 3 don’t precisely line up with the nouns in line 4. “Blue,” “dim,” and “dark” seem to suggest “light,” “half-light,” and “night,” respectively—and the poem’s rhythms would have worked just fine if Yeats put the latter words in that order.
- But Yeats deliberately arranges “night and light and the half-light” in that order, a little out of whack with “the blue and the dim and the dark” in line 3.
This mismatch makes the “heavens’ embroidered cloths” seem to swirl into each other, creating a tapestry of all possible skies. Ultimately, those cloths feel timeless. All days and nights seem wrapped up in the heavens' mysterious, changeable, many-colored fabric.
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Line 5
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
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Lines 6-8
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” Symbols
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The Cloths of Heaven
The "heavens' embroidered cloths" can be read as a symbol of poetry and creativity. The poem’s speaker woos his beloved with a powerful vision of the fabric of the skies. If he could, he tells her, he’d lay the heavens themselves out for his beloved to walk over. He conjures up “blue," "dim," and "dark cloths" “enwrought with golden and silver light,” painting a compelling picture of what the skies would look like if they were indeed rich, silky weavings.
Having brought these cloths so vividly to life with his words, the speaker admits that he can’t really get them for his beloved; he has “only [his] dreams” to offer her, and he lays these out at her feet instead. In a way, the “cloths of heaven” are themselves the speaker’s dreams in that they offer a glimpse of the speaker's imaginative and creative power. He can't literally give these impossible, lovely tapestries to his beloved, but he can offer visions of them through this very poem.
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“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Repetition
Already a short poem, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” feels even more concentrated because of its intense repetitions. Echoing language makes the speaker sound hypnotic—or hypnotized—as he unfolds his gorgeous dreams. The first five lines of the poem use repetitions to create a sense of rich abundance and elegance:
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:The word “cloths” appears three times in these lines. This diacope gives the passage subtle harmony. The speaker describes three heavenly tapestries (one for “night,” one for “light,” and one for the “half-light” of dawn and dusk), so the three appearances of “cloths” feels balanced and fitting. The repetition of “cloths” also returns the reader to the image of these fantastical weavings over and over again; the word swirls around the lines like a sweeping robe.
The polysyndeton on “and,” meanwhile, helps to make the speaker’s descriptions of the cloths feel lavish, piling up one kind of sky on another.
The repetitions in lines 6-8 interweave the “cloths of heaven” with the speaker’s “dreams”:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.“Dreams” takes the same prominent place in these lines that “cloths” did in the first lines, likewise appearing three times. In fact, “dreams” take the place of those “cloths” in more ways than one. The speaker echoes all of line 5 in line 7: “I would spread the cloths under your feet” becomes “I have spread my dreams under your feet.” This parallel suggests that the gorgeous vision of the “cloths of heaven” in the first five lines is part of the dream-carpet the speaker has laid out for his beloved; poetry becomes the fabric of dreams. The famous closing line’s diacope on the word “tread” might suggest the beloved’s first hushed steps over that dreamy carpet.
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Imagery
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Metaphor
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End-Stopped Line
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"He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Enwrought
- Half-light
- Tread
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Embroidered.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
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Form
Yeats invents his own form in “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.” The poem is written in a single octave (or eight-line stanza), though its ABAB CDCD rhyme scheme also divides it into two quatrains. There’s a loose four-beat accentual meter here (that is, a meter measured by the number of strong stressed beats, not by the number of regular metrical feet), though not one that Yeats sticks to strictly.
Yeats’s language makes what might seem like a simple, relaxed form feel intense and hypnotic. A lot of that tone has to do with the poem’s repetitions. Identical end rhymes (“cloths” matches “cloths,” “light” matches “light,” and so on) and diacope on the words “light,” “my dreams,” and “tread” makes an already short poem feel even more concentrated, even more focused.
Strangely, the poem also feels grand and spacious. In just the four first lines, Yeats’s speaker unfurls the imagined “cloths of heaven”—the fabric of the skies, “enwrought with golden and silver light.” “Night and light and the half-light” all spread out wide in just a few words.
This poem’s form, then, is all about compressing huge feelings into a tiny space. That effect feels fitting in a love poem spoken by a man who calls himself “poor” and says he only has his “dreams” to offer his beloved. Like a dream, this poem rolls out vast, enchanted visions in only a few moments.
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Meter
While “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” feels intensely rhythmic, it doesn’t stick to a regular meter. Yeats writes in accentual verse, measuring lines by the number of beats. For the most part, the poem sticks to a four-beat line, as in lines 1-2:
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,One could call these loose iambic tetrameter, or lines of four iambs (poetic feet with two syllables arranged in an unstressed-stressed pattern; note that "heavens'" scans as a single syllable). But the rhythm of the lines changes throughout the poem. For example, take line 7, which opens with an anapest (da-da-DUM), following by an iamb, trochee (DUM-da), and another iamb:
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Compare the rhythm of all those lines with that of the poem’s famous final line:
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Where the strong stresses are spread out evenly across line 2, they cluster at the beginning and end of line 8. That little redistribution changes the whole flavor of these lines: line 2 feels harmonious, line 8 hushed and intense.
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Rhyme Scheme
“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” uses a deceptively simple pattern of identical rhymes. The rhyme scheme runs like this:
ABAB CDCD
However, there are only four rhyme words in the poem. Yeats rhymes “cloths” with “cloths,” “light” with “light,” “feet” with “feet,” and “dreams” with “dreams.” These repetitions create a bold effect: this already short poem feels even more concentrated and hypnotic because of its returns to the same words.
Assonance and consonance help to create that effect, too. The /l/ consonance of “cloths” and “light” and the /ee/ assonance of “feet” and “dreams” weave the rhyme words even more closely together.
In line 4, Yeats enriches the poem’s sounds with a series of internal rhymes:
Of night and light and the half-light,
The combination of internal and identical rhyme here slows the line right down. (The poem’s rhythm helps, too: the words “night,” “light,” and “half-light” are all stressed.) This sequence invites readers to spend time with each of the rhymed words, taking a moment to picture what a cloth made of the night sky, the midday sky, or the twilit sky might look like.
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“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” Speaker
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The poem’s speaker is one Aedh (pronounced “Ed”), an archetypal lover who turns up in a number of Yeats’s poems. (The poem was originally entitled “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” but in later publications Yeats switched to the more general “He,” and the poem is now usually anthologized under that title). A lovelorn dreamer yearning for a powerful lady, Aedh resembles no one so much as Yeats himself, who spent years pining after the actress and Irish Nationalist Maud Gonne.
Readers don’t need any of this context to get a sense of this speaker’s personality. His image of the skies as gorgeously embroidered “cloths” sparkling with “golden and silver light” reveals that he’s a visionary, a man with a rich and sensuous imagination. And his longing to lay those cloths out beneath the feet of his beloved shows that he practically worships her as a goddess.
Even before the speaker confesses that he only has his “dreams” to offer his beloved, then, readers know that this guy is a dreamer. He has a rich and mystical vision of the world, of his beloved, and of love. He also has a sense of the importance of his dreams. Though he regrets that they’re not so grand as the imagined cloths of heaven, he also asks his beloved to “tread softly” upon them: they’re fragile, and in their way precious, too. Perhaps that request betrays the speaker’s anxiety about having his heart kicked around. (Maud Gonne, certainly, never treaded softly on Yeats’s feelings.)
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“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” Setting
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There’s no clear setting in this poem. Instead, the speaker summons up a vision unmoored in time and space. The speaker pictures the “cloths of heaven”: fabric made from all the colors of the skies, from the “blue” of daylight to the “dim[ness]” of dusk to the “dark” of night, shot through with “golden and silver light” from the sun, moon, and stars. This gorgeous image is timeless, like something out of a dream. Perhaps the imagined cloths of heaven even transcend time by weaving day, dusk, and night together.
Readers might imagine the poem taking place in legendary time rather than our world’s time. The speaker’s vision of the “cloths of heaven” feels more like something from Irish myth than from the everyday world. For that matter, readers might see the poem as a vision straight out of the "dreams" the speaker lays out beneath his beloved's feet.
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Literary and Historical Context of “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
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Literary Context
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was the central figure of the Irish Literary Revival (a.k.a. the Celtic Twilight), a movement that brought renewed attention to Ireland's literature, culture, and Gaelic heritage during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He became one of the most famous and acclaimed of all Irish poets and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, who were experimenting with free verse, Yeats loved old poetic forms. He was deeply influenced by the poets of a generation or two before him—for instance, the visionary poetry of the Romantic poet William Blake, the sensuous odes of John Keats, and the works of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. His taste for magic and the occult (both enjoying a renaissance during his lifetime) comes through in his mystical, often dreamlike verse. He's sometimes classed as a Symbolist: an artist reacting against Victorian naturalism in favor of work influenced by myth, imagination, and visions.
Yeats published "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" in his third collection, The Wind Among the Reeds, which appeared in 1899. This small poem has become one of his most famous works.
Historical Context
Yeats wrote this poem when he was deep in the throes of infatuation with Maud Gonne, an actress and Irish Nationalist (that is, a supporter of an Irish state independent from the United Kingdom). Yeats met Gonne as a young man and swiftly fell head over heels for her. Gonne's feelings for Yeats, meanwhile, were a little more complicated. The pair became friends and shared many political and artistic beliefs, but Gonne could not return Yeats's feverish passion.
Across the years they knew each other, Yeats repeatedly proposed to Gonne; Gonne duly turned him down, four times in a row. The yearning Yeats idealized his elusive beloved, treated her as his muse, and depicted her as a goddess or Helen of Troy in poem after poem.
Gonne came to see her frustrating role in Yeats's life as a service to him—and to poetry. When he complained that he couldn't possibly be happy living without her, she briskly replied:
Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.
Nonetheless, Yeats and Gonne would eventually spend one night together after the end of Gonne's unhappy marriage to the soldier Major John MacBride—but an ultimately anticlimactic one. Their romantic relationship didn't evolve beyond that brief encounter.
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More “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Short Biography — Learn more about Yeats's life via the Poetry Foundation.
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The Yeats Society — Visit the website of the Yeats Society, an organization dedicated to celebrating Yeats's work.
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Yeats and Maud Gonne — Read an article discussing Yeats's relationship with Maud Gonne, the woman who inspired this poem (and many, many others).
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Butler Yeats
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