In Yeats' "A Last Confession" the following lines occur:
But when this soul, its body off,
Naked to naked goes ...
This image of stepping out of one's body as one does out of one's clothes derives its tremendous power and suggestiveness from expressing tersely and concisely the Platonic conception of the soul only temporarily and incidentally enfolded by its body, an idea which found a place in Christian theology
Poems, even parts of poems, are intended to and usually do make an impact standing by themselves (though appreciation may be increased by knowing other poems by the author and being acquainted with the history of poetry). You need not have read Plato or Christian mystics to appreciate the image of the soul after death "its body off. " Its masterly compression represents to me the very essence of great poetry. But surely Yeats could not have shaped the image without an appreciation of Plato's philosophy in which the idea of the soul as only a temporary resident, or even a prisoner in the body, is interlinked with his theory of forms and his onception of philosophy as a kind of dying. [Hans Peter Rickman, Philosophy in Literature p. 21]
If one of us ever ended up at one of those parties that literati are said to throw from time to time, we could impress people if Yeats' name ever came up or this poem. The original source is Maximus of Tyre and it had an influence on the Letter to Theodore.
Here is Yeats poem in full:
A Last Confession
What lively lad most pleasured me
Of all that with me lay?
I answer that I gave my soul
And loved in misery,
But had great pleasure with a lad
That I loved bodily.
Flinging from his arms I laughed
To think his passion such
He fancied that I gave a soul
Did but our bodies touch,
And laughed upon his breast to think
Beast gave beast as much.
I gave what other women gave
That stepped out of their clothes.
But when this soul, its body off,
Naked to naked goes,
He it has found shall find therein
What none other knows,
And give his own and take his own
And rule in his own right;
And though it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There's not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight.
On second thought, maybe one of those imbecilic hoaxers will now somehow try to connect Morton Smith to Yeats. They already have Oscar Wilde as 'evidence.' Sheesh ...
The point still is that γυμνὸς γυμνῷ - 'naked with naked' or 'naked to naked' - is a well established Platonic formula that has nothing to do with homosexuality whatsoever. Even in a gay poem, it means some 'not gay'
