W.B.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There are days when only Yeats will do:

 

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with the golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;

Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

 

Also, this line:

O love is a crooked thing,

There is nobody wise enough

To find out all that is in it.

 

And this:

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures

And now my heart is sore.

 

And, always, the terrible beauty and the pilgrim soul, which come in quite different poems, but seem to me to be connected by a slender, pulling thread.

 

And sometimes, everyone needs something pretty on which to rest their eyes:

And, finally, everything green in the whole world, or at least the small patch of it outside my front door: