WB Yeats Poems : Help analysing?

Question

i need the analysis of "The Cold Heaven" and "A Coat"... Any Ideas? i cant seem to crack it

Answer 1

"The Cold Heaven"

Heaney argues that "The Cold Heaven" affords a "spiritual proffer" denied by "Aubade" (RP 149). This is a bold claim. On the face of it, "The Cold Heaven" records a wholly bleak spasm of guilt. Indeed, the poet savagely questions the consolation of scripture, speculating that the promised Judgment will be an unjust one:

Ah! When the ghost begins to quicken, Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken By the injustice of the skies for punishment? (Yeats 62)

Heaney argues that though a "personal God" may have disappeared in this poem, nevertheless "The spirit still suffers from a sense of answerability, of responsibility, to a something out there, an intuited element that is as credible as the 'rook-delighting heaven' itself." And it is this answerability (albeit to an unjust judge) which, in Heaney's view, gives the poem the "spiritual illumination" which "Aubade" lacks (RP, 148-9).

Heaney insists that this "positive . . . commitment" is fully embodied in Yeats's poetry. "[S]tylistic excellence and . . . spiritual proffer converge":
When, in one place the verb "to quicken" is rhymed with "stricken" and still manages to hold its own against it, and when, in another, the rhyme word "season" sets its chthonic reliability against the potentially debilitating force of "reason" - when such things occur, the art of the poem is functioning as a corroboration of the positive emotional and intellectual commitments of the poet. (RP 149)

But this analysis disregards the context of the poem. As Yeats uses it, the word "quicken" is ominous; the soul is quickened only to be stricken by the injustice of the skies. It is difficult to see in what sense "quicken" holds its own against "stricken" here. Moreover the "chthonic reliability" which Heaney detects in "season" and the "debilitating" implication he finds in "reason" are figments of his imagination:

and left but memories, that should be out of season With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago; And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason, Until I cried and trembled . . . (Yeats 125)

Both words indicate a normality which the poet's unseasonable, irrational guilt has broken. In Heaney's organicist lexicon, however, the word-icons "season" and "reason" are opposites: one chthonic, the other debilitating. Intent on "the spiritual upbeat of Yeats's rhymes," he fails to hear their actual signification. He concludes that the poem "suggests that there is an overall purpose to life; and it does so by the intrinsically poetic action of its rhymes, its rhythms, and its exultant intonation" (RP 149). This is wrong. "The Cold Heaven" does not suggest an overall purpose to life, nor is its intonation exultant. It records a spasm of despair, and its intonation is anguished. It is not an earnest meditation on last things; it is a vivid mood-piece.(10)
Heaney sees the poet as unearthing preexistent spiritual truth. In contrast Yeats and Larkin see the spirit's work as aesthetic creation. They are romantic Neoplatonists dreaming the unattainable. For Yeats the dream takes the form of "love lost long ago," Byzantium, or "what vanishes"; for Larkin it takes the form of "that much-mentioned brilliance, love," "how life should be," or "attics cleared of me" (CP 113, 44, 49). Their imagery is apparently antithetical: Yeats's exotic and romantic, Larkin's familiar and realistic. Yeats is an egotist, whereas Larkin's transcendent images frequently involve "a sublime self-forgetting" (Swarbrick 40). Larkin, moreover, expressed disillusion with "that **** Yeats, farting out his histrionic rubbish" (qtd. in Watt 175). But the violence of his disappointment is that of a passionate lover. Despite the differences of rhetoric it is still Yeatsian Beauty that enthralls him.
**

"A Coat"

"A Coat" is a good example of this phase of Yeats' poetry in style and content; indeed, this poem demonstrates that style is inseparable from content. No lush descriptions of nature, no reliance on obvious poetic devices such as assonance and consonance. The subject of the poem is his announcement that he is finished with his previous style of poetry. His "song" ( = poetry) was a "coat" -- "embroidered," made of "old mythologies," but others have imitated him ('the fools caught it,/ Wore it in the world's eyes/ As thought they'd wrought it,"; But Yeats is finished with this style, " for there's more enterprise/ In walking naked." Naked= unadorned, honest, stripped-down, bare, personal, simple, direct. In this poem is announces that his new style will serve his content; they are one; style and content are naked.

Answer 2

Yeats A Coat

Answer 3

Answerer 1 deserves a medal. You, on the other hand....

Answer 4

The poem is "The Wheel"