Naturism | Poetry | A Coat

"Everybody knows that the naked man and woman are just a shining artefact of the past."

- Leonard Cohen

We’re going to begin today’s discussion of ‘naturism’ and poetry with this famous short poem by W. B. Yeats:

A Coat

I made my song a coat

Covered with 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.

It is often tempting with poetry to pinpoint a single word or phrase as being the ‘lynchpin’ of the poem; the idea upon which every other word is leaning. One instinctively points at that word ‘naked’ in Yeats’ poem as being the keystone, for it is the final word, being leant on heavily by the half-rhyme of ‘take it’, and it is the word with the widest obvious semantic field.

Nudity in writing is often seen as a symbol of honesty (as in ‘the naked truth’) and this is certainly part of what Yeats is aiming at. He is miffed at the way that his ornate verse has been misinterpreted and mimicked by those who have no comprehension of what they are mimicking – like a British hip-hop enthusiast shouting ‘Westside!’ with no idea of where this tradition comes from.

Yeats laments how ‘fools’ have taken the superficial forms of his poems on board, without every truly understanding their essence; the vehicle of this metaphor being ‘coat and wearer’ and the tenor being  ‘poetic form and content’.

But what then, of this idea of ‘enterprise’? We have the obvious link here with boldness and adventurousness in an endeavour (eg. Starship Enterprise) but, do we not also take from this poem the idea of enterprise as meaning ‘business initiative’? Yeats’ ‘enterprise in walking naked’ can certainly be paraphrased with the idea that ‘there’s more money in nudity’.

In this sense, I do not think that we can equate Yeats’ use of ‘naked’ with ‘honesty’ – I get the sense that he is being a little more bitchy. If he were implying that ‘naked’ verse is better than this ‘coat’-wearing kind that everyone’s been copying, then he is more or less implying that all of his old work is not worth bothering with. This is not the sort of thing that Yeats would ever suggest.

So we have the possibility that he is using ‘naked’ in its most literal sense of ‘not dressed’, or to take it even further, ‘not bothered to get dressed’. We know that Yeats was very much of the opinion that poets should be ‘lamps’ rather than ‘mirrors’ to the world, and so the idea of blurting out language designed to merely reflect reality is something that would seem lazy to him.

If we are to modify our metaphor in this poem to take ‘naked’ for ‘undressed’ then what Yeats is perhaps referring to is the idea that ‘there is more money or business potential in writing poems that do not seem to have gone through the poetic process but rather appear as fragments of the familiar’. More ‘enterprise’ then, because ‘naked poetry’ is the sort of poetry that has a wider audience, and this is the sort of poetry that doesn’t take as much effort to write.

To fully understand Yeats’ use of the word ‘naked’ however, we must take some notice of the fact that it is preceded by the word ‘walking’. This choice of verb is an interesting one when we know that it is being done in the nude. ‘Being’ naked would be no point of interest, but ‘walking’? Are we to think of the emperor’s new clothes here? I am more reminded of this iconic line from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl:

“who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts.”

Whilst some read this as an ultimate depiction of crassness, I read it (and I feel that Yeats would read it) as the requisite lack of inhibition needed to write anything of value. By having his disorderly beatniks dragged off a roof holding their writing in one hand and their naked form in the other, he is forcing us to compare the two in terms of offensiveness. Ginsberg urges the conclusion that nothing he could ever write could shock or offend the status quo as much as the naked human body – and for what? As a species that require genitals for our continuation, why then such taboos over disrobing?

Which brings us to our final (at least for tonight) inference to be made from Yeats’ use of ‘naked’ -  nudity as symbol of vulnerability.

If you get nervous, just imagine everyone in the room naked, the age-old useless piece of advice goes.

It was so weird seeing my ex-girlfriend the other day, knowing we’d seen each other naked, we type into our instant messaging boxes.

Underneath your clothes, there’s a different story, that’s the man I chose, that’s my territory sings Shakira, one of the finest poets ever to have disguised herself as a pop star.

If we look back at what Yeats describes of his ‘Coat’ in the beginning of the poem; covered with ornate embroideries, full body-length in size; we get the definite image of what Neil Strauss would describe as ‘peacocking’, do we not? The idea of masking your insecurities by wearing the sort of flamboyant thing that only a very confident, secure and socially uninhibited person might wear.

So with the nudity comes that level of vulnerability and emotional earnestness that is at the heart of much of the literary heritage. I am reminded of a scene in one of the Bridget Jones films where our protagonist is trying to cover up her ‘lumpy bits’ with a duvet and Colin Firth in his loveable British way saying ‘don’t be ridiculous, I love your lumpy bits’.

For an interesting rebuke to Yeats’ ‘Coat’ however, one need look no further than ‘The Mask’, a poem in which he suggests that it is our lovers’ illusions and personas that we fall for rather than the naked self:

“It was the mask engaged your mind,

And after set your heart to beat,

Not what’s behind.”

As with any great poetry, Yeats is clearly forcing every word to pull its weight and then some. In this particular case, ‘naked’ is being used to tie together ideas of honesty, lack of inhibition, vulnerability, laziness and intimacy all in two sexy little syllables. Nice work W.B., now put the kettle on.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Second Person | Poetry | Are You Talking To Me?

If this looks like a poem
I might as well warn you at the beginning
that it’s not meant to be one.

So begins one of my favourite Leonard Cohen poems, The Cuckold’s Song. I wonder if, like me, you thought he was talking to you, the ethereal reader, in those lines? As it turns out, the whole thing is aimed at the chap who has cuckolded him:

I know all about her part in it
but I’m not concerned with that right now.
This is between you and me.

and like a well-orchestrated focus-pull, that word ‘you’ takes on a different shape altogether.

The gender-less second-person pronoun is one of the poet’s most abundant tools for tricks and twists in that game of readerly cat and mouse we so often play with good art. Of course we have that most famous case of Shakespeare’s ‘young man’ who is so often assumed to be female by first-time readers of the sonnets, but beyond that, poetry is a world filled with people who choose to hide their feelings behind the blurred word, ‘you’.

Let us take the poem, Dog, from Mark Waldron’s excellent collection The Brand New Dark. The poem opens:

I had thought of you as I lay fighting
off this sleep. Now I find you as you squat
my dream as a dog…

Now we can almost certainly establish that the ‘you’ of the poem is not a literal dog. What then, should we assume? Our instincts want to tell us that the ‘you’ is a lover, for lovers are what we lose sleep over and who we find ourselves writing poetry for in those restless nights. But then again, what if ‘you’ is me? What if ‘you’ is you as you read this poem. Maybe it is you, or the idea of you that has caused Waldron these sleepless nights as he anticipates your reception of his poetry. An unqualified ‘you’ can prove to be quite the potent bomb of possibility in the hands of the right poet – a cluster bomb catching all in its blast radius with the illusion of address.

For all the refractive possibilities of the anonymous ‘you’ however, some of the most masterful poets have managed to use a specific second-person to create a sort of blurred illusion of sharpness in their address. I am thinking specifically here of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters. Of course, these poems are explicitly addressed to Sylvia Plath, but as Hughes’ writing process continued over 25 years we can see that he is writing to infinite versions and reinventions of his late wife. The poem, ‘Portraits’ opens:

What happened to Howard’s portrait of you?
I wanted that painting.

Whilst we take ‘you’ to be the simple address of a husband to his wife, we know that it also stands for so much more. In the context of a portrait, ‘you’ becomes the version of Plath that was held in Howard’s “molten, luminous” depiction of her. As such, the past-tense line, “I wanted that painting”, comes to suggest that Hughes preferred this vibrant, numinous version of his wife and the word ‘you’ is shattered into the thousand people that Plath became throughout her life as is the case with all of us, especially those who have had the misfortune of suffering from depression.

Whilst I shall not dwell on it here for it has been overdone elsewhere, it is this same skill that Eliot uses so well in Prufrock when he manages to make the word ‘you’ stand for the conflicting sides of his psyche:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Finally, though, the reason I find it so easy to get engrossed in the letters of my favourite writers is ‘you’. When we read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, do we not secretly blind-spot the word ‘Mr. Kappus’ and pretend that he is writing to us? I have vivid memories of reading the following section around about my twentieth year:

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like loved rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

When we read these words, do we not feel as though the world itself is speaking directly to us? The writers die and re-enter the earth but the words they addressed to other people enter the atmosphere and come to our aid wearing the time-honoured passport to our soul – the word ‘you’.


Phil Brown
Poetry Editor