Stitching and Unstitching: Yeats Material and Immaterial

W.B. Yeatss repeated employment of textiles in poetry and plays is various, self-conscious, and revealing. Modernist textile poems, whether by Eliot, Pound, or Stevens, have in common a predilection for talking about their own procedures: Yeats, in line with his philosophical affinities, often suggests that material, whether of tapestries, costumes, curtains, or veils might be lifted to reveal a life beyond. It is significant however that this material revelation of the immaterial tends to be allied with and sometimes triggered by sound: vocal sound and song in particular. The cultural and textual histories of this interest in art and work associated with women deserves further scrutiny. This paper addresses the rhapsodic character of the stitching and unstitching of Adams Curse, and the interweaving of A Coat with Ezra Pounds blasting tribute to verse-speakers Come My Cantilations, as well attempting to unpick the involved theology and symbolism of silk, cotton, and damask in later dense poems such as Symbols, Fragments, and Wisdom. In adopting sound as the essential material of poetry, these poems co-opting of textile-making as a central allegory for poetrys making calls upon the collaborations of women, uncovering an important history of textile making through the embroideries of May Morris, the costumes of Charles Ricketts, and the all-female work of Yeatss sisters Elizabeth and Lily and their apprentices at Dun Emer, later Cuala Industries. As in Cuchulain Comforted, such revivals of handcraft over manufacture might restore (in song) a communal aspect to making not readily associated with Yeatss later aesthetics: crucially, even this most posthumous poem is not only concerned with the world beyond, but invested in the labour and economic exchanges of this one.