Poem | Dreams Like Yeats

 

A portrait of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)


Love is Moving Magazine published a new poem of mine this week, a sample of what is to come in my upcoming poetry book with Alabaster Leaves Publishing! 

Ever since I read the poems of W.B. Yeats in secondary school, I've been enamoured with his beautiful use of the English language and the imagery of each poem. In writing this poem, I finally had the opportunity to quote his words and weave them into a work of my own. The first line of it comes from his poem, 'Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven', which I adore. My own poem, similarly, speaks of desires and wishes. I hope you enjoy both!


Dreams like Yeats

Sophia Conway


I have spread my dreams, W.B. Yeats utters, tread softly

Walk carefully, and guard each step ahead.

I utter the same words to this house, our home

Becomes a church shadow as each day turns over,

Light and day falling and rising around as I haunt

The threshold here.


The hopes and requests I murmur fuse with the old

Wood and new paint becoming one; a house of

many dreams, and soon a life of many

Colours if I have my way.


I hear each desire whispered back in the stillness of the

Endless nights; echoes and mutterings, a flurry

Of prayers, clutching at meditations.

This home filled with wishes deeper than a wishing well.

My endless pleading becomes this shrine’s endless bell.



Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

W. B. Yeats


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.