I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly…

The two lines end a poem of eight, printed in The Wind Among the Reeds under the title “Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”; Yeats later replaced Aedh, one of the book’s imaginary speakers, with a plain “He”. The first four lines conjure the cloths of heaven, “Enwrought with golden and silver light”, “Of night and light and the half light”: had he these, the speaker would spread them under his beloved’s feet. But being poor, he has only his dreams, and the closing lines offer those instead.

The Wind Among the Reeds appeared in 1899, and its love poems are coloured by Yeats’s long, unreturned love for Maud Gonne, met in 1889. The poem has no rhymes: each line ends on a word that returns two lines later, cloths, light, feet, dreams. That plainness made it one of the best-loved poems in English.

The last line is read at weddings, and “tread softly” has become a way of asking for gentleness with what someone holds dear.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (The Wind Among the Reeds), last lines, 1899

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work