Writer Spotlight - W.B Yeats

This month I want to share one of my all time favourite poems with you. I know many of you will know it, have heard it, read it, and maybe even love it too.

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

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.

I had the most beautiful conversation with my son the other evening. We were chatting about love, about poetry, and about what he was studying in school. He was telling me what his favourite poem was and I asked had he heard of this one. He had not.

I had the opportunity to share it, speak it aloud, and share what it means.

I have always been a romantic, I don't like the term hopeless because, why would anyone want to be a hopeless anything, but I digress. I love love, I love seeing love, hearing about love, listening to love, watching love, and I am partial to googly eyes, holding hands, huge public displays of affection, declaring love for your person from rooftops ( or bar tops as it was in my case ... a story for another day ), and the beauty and mystery in someone finding a muse they just can't get out of their minds, and love whole heartedly, regardless of whether that love is returned or not ... but that does make me sad. Unrequited love.

8 lines.

8 short but potent and powerFULL lines of a poem, and every time I read it I feel like I am right there, sitting with W.B as he stares longingly at Maud Gonne.

That is the power of a writer. He wrote from his heart, he wrote his feelings, he poured himself into 8 short lines that can be felt and experienced long after it was written.

I was a muse once, what a place to be!

If you are not pouring your heart and soul, your humour and wit, your deepest self, dreams, wants and vision into what you're writing ... why are you writing?

I invite you today to write something meaningful. Write something that could change a life, change a community, change the world ... and then sit back and read it. Let the depth of feeling you wrote it from wash over you, and know that people will be feeling that depth long after you're gonne!

Xoxo

Ciara