It is, of course, a cliché to say that suffering can be transformed by a great artist into beauty – but one worth repeating, nonetheless.
The most delicate of poems, W. B. Yeats’s ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ was indeed born out of pain – his unrequited love for the Irish actress and independence activist Maud Gonne. She turned down his proposal of marriage four times… so he wrote this aching jewel of a poem. Lucky us!
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.
Here it is, delivered with great sensitivity by Anthony Hopkins in the rather charming film ’84 Charing Cross Road’:
