At the Feet of the Goddess: Yeats’s Love Poetry and the Feminist Occult

Abstract

Yeats’s early poetry consistently deploys the traditional romance structure of elevation and abasement: the mistress is above and the lover is at her feet. “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is paradigmatic: 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. (VP 176) Elaborate repetition and consonantal patterning establish the cloths of heaven as both the starry skies and the costly blue vestments of a priest dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Expensive formal and imagistic embroidery, however, is beyond the means of the “poor” poet, who resorts to chivalric gesture, spreading his dreams under the feet of his goddess as Raleigh spread his cloak over the puddle for Queen Elizabeth. The spare, impoverished diction of “But I, being poor, have only my dreams” asks us to sympathise with the indigent and helpless male;2 but why should women readers be moved by the poetic representation of a love service that reverses and denies the actual relations of power between the sexes?3