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The Cap and Bells

Dreamed 1894 by W.B. Yeats

The jester walked in the garden:
The garden had fallen still;
He bade his soul rise upward
And stand on her window-sill.

It rose in a straight blue garment,
When owls began to call:
It had grown wise-tongued by thinking
Of a quiet and light footfall;

But the young queen would not listen;
She rose in her pale night-gown;
She drew in the heavy casement
And pushed the latches down.

He bade his heart go to her,
When the owls called out no more;
In a red and quivering garment
It sang to her through the door.

It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming
Of a flutter of flower-like hair;
But she took up her fan from the table
And waved it off on the air.

"I have cap and bells," he pondered,
"I will send them to her and die";
And when the morning whitened
He left them where she went by.

She laid them upon her bosom,
Under a cloud of her hair,
And her red lips sang them a love-song
Till stars grew out of the air.

She opened her door and her window,
And the heart and the soul came through,
To her right hand came the red one,
To her left hand came the blue.

They set up a noise like crickets,
A chattering wise and sweet,
And her hair was a folded flower
And the quiet of love in her feet.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Why do the jester's soul and then his heart fail to win his dream-queen? Why is it the emblem of his art that wins her over at last? It's not dream-nonsense. Yeats, awake or asleep, always valued discipline and craft, even if your chosen art is humble. Have a transcendental vision, sure, but report it fully and fairly; and then come the twenty-seven rewrites.

One more thing: this was published in The Wind among the Reeds, a collection closing with the lines:

I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
To learn that some of the poems he's speaking of are real, private dreams he's baring brings a new poignancy to those lines for me, as a fellow dream-artist. He means it.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats (1962), pp.24-5. DREAM: Deirdre Barrett writes, in The Committee of Sleep (p.42) "Yeats said he dreamed [the Cap and Bells] 'exactly as I have written it'," citing as her source the 1899 edition of The Wind Among the Reeds, pp.94-5.



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