"A Coat" by William Butler Yeats

I taught today’s poem to my 6th grade class on the first day, and we had so much fun. I hope you enjoy it.

A Coat

by William Butler Yeats

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.

After our pre-reading, my students had the following questions:

• What does Yeats mean by “song” and “coat?” They obviously can’t both be literal.

• What does he mean by “walking naked?”

• What is “embroideries?”

• What does “wrought” mean?

• What does “enterprise” mean?

And, here is the paraphrase we came up with as our first step to answering these questions:

I made a coat for my art, covered from top to bottom with intricate designs inspired by stories from mythology. But, fools stole the coat, and they showed it to the whole world as though they’d made it themselves. Let them keep it. It is much braver to walk around naked.

At first, we were merely concerned with the literal meaning of the poem. Once we uncovered the meanings of the words we didn’t fully understand, like “wrought” and “enterprise,” we were able to talk about the total meaning of the poem. The total meaning takes into account not just the literal meaning of the words, but also the overall intent of the piece, and the overtones of meaning that words take on when used in certain ways.

I asked my students, “Let’s pretend that you could in fact take a song you heard on the radio and cover it ‘from heel to throat’ in a coat, and that the coat was covered in beautiful, intricate designs. What might happen to the song inside of it?” Many students gave great answers, but my favorite was this one (from a brand new student on her first day of literature class, no less!): “The people who listen to the song might miss the meaning of it because they are distracted by the designs on the coat.”

We went on to discuss what it would mean, given our understanding of the metaphor thusfar, to have a fool “catch” the coat and wear it in front of everyone as if they’d made it themselves. We kicked this one around for a while, and eventually landed on the conclusion that someone tried to copy the song, or the style of the song, but only used the coat and its embroideries, which they didn’t even understand. So their mimicry was poor—it missed the essential point of the piece.

Then, when we arrived again at the last lines, “Song, let them take it, for there’s more enterprise in walking naked,” another new student excitedly put in, without waiting for me to ask, “Oh! So that’s why it’s better to ‘walk naked’—because the true meaning of the song, or any art, should be clear—not covered with distracting adornments.”

What followed was a lovely discussion of how this metaphor might apply to any kind of art—poetry, music, novels, and even painting. But what everyone really enjoyed was when we started talking about the irony of this poem…Isn’t it ironic that this poem has a “coat” of its own in the form of … well, the coat metaphor? This led beautifully into what I really wanted to discuss with them after I first discovered this poem, which is the difference between excellent adornments and useless ones, and how to know the difference.

Does this “adornment” (literary device, in this case) add to the central meaning of the poem, and help it to be more effectively communicated? Or, does it not have much purpose in the grand scheme of the piece, and thereby mainly distract from the main idea?

I’d love to hear what you think about this question in relation to “A Coat” in the comments.