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.
— William Butler Yeats, “A Coat”
Spot on.
I’m a bit amused that 2/3 of the “related” posts are about your chore coat.
It is indeed funny. It’s word “coat,” of course, that brings them up. But it does look like we are definitely anti-nudity.
Well, I just have to throw this out there…
“What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?” – Michelangelo
At the feast of fools
Everybody has a voice
Nobody goes to the bottom
Except by their own choice
At the feast of fools
Outlaws can all come home
You can wear any disguise you want
But you’ll be naked past the bone
So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
by William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
[“The Red Wheelbarrow”] sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester. He used to tell me how he had to work in the cold in freezing weather, standing ankle deep in cracked ice packing down the fish. He said he didn’t feel cold. He never felt cold in his life until just recently. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing. Quoted in Rizzo, Sergio (2005). “Remembering Race: Extra-poetical Contexts and the Racial Other in “The Red Wheelbarrow””. Journal of Modern Literature.