THE MASKS OF DIFFERENCE

One of the best-known poems in The Wind among the Reeds, ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ (P 70), makes very explicit the conscious link in Yeats's early work between love and poetic creation. This is the poem in which Yeats claims that, had he ‘the heavens’ embroidered cloths’, he would spread them under his lover's 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.’ By the time he had completed Responsibilities (1914), he felt that it would be a significant gesture to end the volume with ‘The Coat’ (P 127). (There is another poem, but it continues from the first in the volume, and operates like a closing bracket.) ‘A Coat’ is a conscious repudiation of ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’:

We can infer that the poem is not just about love's disillusionment, but also about the abandonment of the late Romantic manner, first in point of subject matter (no more old mythologies), and second in point of the adoption of a new style for which the word ‘naked’ is an appropriate epithet. The tone of disillusionment should be noted not just for itself, but for the way it is congruent with a disillusionment with former political affiliations, which we shall have to note. And, finally, there is a disillusionment with the idealization of the beloved woman, which actually brings with it a new theory of woman which becomes bound up with some new theories about poetic creativity.

To take first the topic of woman's nature and the new theory of poetry. The most cogent introduction to this topic may be provided by a poem which, conveniently, seems to run on lines of thought parallel to those to be found in ‘A Coat’, though it comes from the earlier collection In the Seven Woods (1904).