W.B. Yeats’s Ballad "The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes", its Genre Peculiarities and Mythopoetic Symbolism

William Butler Yeats’s ballad The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes differs from folk ballads in its literary genre and mythopoetic symbolism. This comprehensive, multidisciplinary study investigates the poem’s linguistic and literary aspects by integrating methods of literary criticism (genre, comparative, mythopoetic, and hermeneutic analysis) with linguistic approaches (analysis of dictionary definitions, as well as contextual and stylistic analysis). The findings demonstrate both similarities to and differences from the poem’s folk roots. The major difference is that the poet transcends the limitations of the traditional genre, imparting two semantic layers of varying depth. This duality stems from the ambivalent essence of the wanderer called Sorrow, who is divided into anthropomorphic images of human grief and death. The ritual-and-mythological substratum of the text reveals numerous references to an archaic world model, testifying to the key role of the mythopoetic component. The thanatological plot motif of the seafarer who personifies death is full of mythopoetic symbols that correlate with archaic burial rituals and initiation riddles. Mythopoetic symbolism also manifests itself in the trinity of the composition and the prohibition on the direct nomination of death as a mythological object. The multi-level linguistic devices enhance the figurative and expressive structure of the poetic text. The mythopoetic symbolism extracted from the ballad’s linguistic fabric expands its semantic horizons.

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