What the hell. While I'm here, I may as well post this - it's not like I need to have a final thought on Yeats anyway. So...

A Coat
William Butler Yeats
1916

I made my song a coat
covered in embroideries
out of old mythologies
from heel to throat;
but the fools caught it,
wore it in the world’s eyes
as though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
for there’s more enterprise
in walking naked.

Among the things I like: the poem starts with a specific statement that’s true, a statement that exists in full in the first line, and in fuller in the first four lines. “I made my song a coat.” Yeats cloaked himself in his work. Even if you’re not looking for a metaphor, you still accept that, yeah, it’s true, this poet did wrap himself up in his art. And the literal truth of the first statement progresses through the first quatrain – a cursory reading of the titles of Yeats’ work from any Yeats anthology will show you that Irish and Greek myth play a significant role in his career. And if I can recall my first reading, I didn’t even notice the embroideries/mythologies rhyme (much less the world’s eyes/enterprise rhyme). Anyway, in that small, seemingly straightforward sentence, Yeats says something simple but powerful about his relationship with his work.

The following three lines, held together by the caught it/wrought it rhyme, remind me of James Joyce’s comment about his novel Finnegan’s Wake, published after the heavily analyzed Ulysses, when he said of the obscurities he deliberately put into it something like, “This ought to drive the scholars crazy.” These contemporaries shared the same problem, that they wrote what they were compelled to write, only to have academic after academic say what it meant with the authority that comes from the teacher/student relationship. This must be frustrating – imagine the number of writers who wish they had a similar problem.

Anyway, the song ends with a “the hell with it,” a surrender to the idea of controlling only what a man can control. But the way it ends, with the opening of the coat and the ending of walking naked, demonstrates the apparently effortless control Yeats asserts over the work. In short, the poem’s simplicity in language and imagery, as well as the clarity established by the rhyme, make this one of my Yeats favorites, along with “The Scholars,” a poem that seems to continue the theme established in “A Coat,” and “Politics.”