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.
References
Cullingford, E.B
1993 Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry. Cambridge: CUP.
Emmott, C
1997 Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gavins, J
2007 Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: EUP.
Grice, H.P
1975 Logic and conversation. In
Syntax and Semantics, Vol. III, Speech Acts,
P. Cole &
J.L. Morgan (eds), 41–58. New York NY: Academic Press.
Hone, J
1962[1942] W.B. Yeats. 1865–1939. London: Macmillan & Co.
Jeffries, L
2008 The role of style in reader-involvement: Deictic shifting in contemporary poems.
JLS 37: 69–85.
Morrall, C
2008 The Language of Others. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Ryan, M-L
1991 Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.
Semino, E
1997 Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. London: Longman.
Short, M
2008 “Where are you going to my pretty maid?” “For detailed analysis, sir”, she said. In
The State of Stylistics,
G. Watson (ed.), 1–29. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Short, M
2011 A teaching career in three chapters: Why I teach Stylistics, how I teach it and why I enjoy it. In
Teaching Stylistics,
L. Jeffries &
D. McIntyre (eds), 30–51. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stockwell, P
2002 Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Werth, P
1999 Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.
Widdowson, H.G
1975 Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature. London: Longman.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Lugea, Jane
2017.
The year’s work in stylistics 2016.
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 26:4
► pp. 340 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.