Can anyone help me place a fragment of poetry, please?

[Donald Ian Rankin]

Something like

"Why should my heart have been under her heel,
Where a heart had no reason to be?"

It's a man talking about how a woman he has given his heart to has trampled it, but he doesn't blame her. I can half-remember the poem, but not who it's by or what it's called. I can't find it using google. Can anyone help me, please?

[raccoon]

1. Wish I could help you with that. I've been trying for decades

to find out the origin of the line, "Sweet bird of youth, where hast thou flown?" I've searched in every quotations book I can lay my hands on. I've searched using various search engines.

It's from some Victorian poem, because I ran into it in a Victorian literature class, but I don't remember the title or the author.

[BurtWorm]

2. Tennyson?

I just googled it. The actual line is "Sweet bird of youth, wither hast thou flown?"

PS: On closer inspection, I don't know if it is Tennyson, because if you Google his name and the phrase "Sweet bird of youth" nothing turns up.

:shrug:

[Fiatjustitia]

3. Perhaps you are thinking of different lines...

This is William Butler Yeats' "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" in which similar lines appear at the end:

"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.

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

[LeftishBrit]

4. Can't help directly...

but there's a Tennessee Williams play, "Sweet Bird of Youth", and it occurs to me that it's just possible that an annotated edition of the play might give the origin of the poem.