Today is William Butler Yeats' birthday! Born in 1865, he would have been 144 years old today. He was an Irish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. A complicated man, his poems are musings on aging and death, the natural world, the spiritual world, and mythology. He left behind a body of work rich in imagery and rife with beauty. Read this most exquisite of love poems and sing a song of praise and thanksgiving for the life of William Butler Yeats.

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
By William Butler Yeats
(Published in The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899)

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and the 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 upon my dreams.