Chapter 10. Stylistics and “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by W.B. Yeats

This chapter will provide a detailed stylistic analysis of ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ by W. B. Yeats. The analysis will combine of a range of analytical methods, most of which will be of the ‘good old steam stylistics’ variety, as Ron Carter has called them, e.g. lexical, grammatical and phonetic structure in relation to foregrounding analysis; but other methods of analysis will also be used, e.g. cognitive metaphor and possible/textual worlds theory. At the core of the analysis will be a discussion of how, and why, Yeats makes the cloths of heaven in the poem seem intangible, mystical, even, and the role which deviant semantic structure and also deviant parallel list constructions inside a particular noun phrase play in the creation of this cognitive effect. Part of the reason for the multifarious approach to analysis is to compare the usefulness of the various kinds of methodology for the stylistic analysis of poetry. Attention will also be paid to different possible interpretations/readings of the poem and what this can tell us about the nature of effective interpretation.