Tuesday Poetry Blogging: William Butler Yeats

I missed Friday poetry/cat/shoe blogging, so I guess this is a late entry to catch up.

I love Yeats, but I recognize his faults. He is not always easy to love textually, and I suspect he was even less easy to love personally.

For example, there's this: so beautiful and so heartfelt that it invariably makes me tear up--and yet so guilt-trippy, so demanding, so threaded with bitterness. Is this the voice of a man who feels too passionately for anyone's good?

Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroider'd 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.