A Month with Yeats: Day Seventeen

I intended to choose lines that weren’t the most obvious, but it’s impossible not to pick something from ‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’.

‘The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,’ —W.B. Yeats

My poem (written this morning; I’m getting behind) is another almost-sonnet.

 

The stuff the sky is made of

 

I’d take the stuff the sky is made of,

Weave it through with spangled night,

Where stars and wisps of cloud are caught,

Embroider it with tangled light,

With threads of gold and palest rose.

I’d hang it round our shoulders both,

A mantle ’gainst the winter snows

And all the hurts the years will bring.

I’d line it with the softest down,

And all the songs that birds can sing,

With salt tang blown in from the sea,

The apple blossom scent of spring,

So these elusive dreams we thought had fled,

Will rise like morning mist where our feet tread.

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