Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

I’m starting to really love the internet. Yep, turning into a real geek.

First I upload all my bookmarks onto del.icio.us after an horrid scare installing (and uninstalling) Mozilla Firefox, and then…

I found the Yeats poem that Sean Bean’s character is reciting in the film Equilibrium (as mentioned here, thanks to the following site.

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.

-William Butler Yeats

Ah. Don’t knock Yeats, he knew how to turn out a decent ditty or two. That site could get very, very addictive.

Will post a real book reference so you can find the poem the traditional way too.

As promised, book reference. The edition I have (the one they recommended for first-year lit students when I was still at uni) is A. Norman Jeffares, Poems of W. B. Yeats, (Houndsmill, Basingstoke & London: Macmillan, 1988) 171. In section 10: ‘Love and Sex’. In the annotations at the back of the book, Yeats is apparently quoted as having said that this poem was a way to lose a lady. I rather think the opposite would happen nowadays (do men today even have dreams? All they seem to dream of…is themselves).