Professional Documents
Culture Documents
117
Vol. 45 (2014): 117-129
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gyres of the historical cone as we see it and hoping that by this study I may
see deeper into what is to come.” This search issued in A Vision (1925), that
strange construct, which has troubled his admirers so much, an amalgam of
history, psychology, and eschatology, in which Byzantium as historical, no
less than as an artistic entity, has an important role. (132-3)
The late nineteenth century saw many books about Byzantium published in
England and other countries in Europe. In England, J. B. Bury’s History of
the Later Roman Empire was published in 1889 and O. M. Dalton’s
Byzantine Art was published in 1911, one copy of which Yeats bought some
years later (Gordon and Fletcher 133). The reason Yeats thought of
Byzantium as the most beautiful and artistic city among the innumerable
cities of the ancient world is that he read such books as O. M. Dalton’s and
W. G. Holmes’s in which Byzantium is described as an ideal city. Norman
Jeffares adds to Yeats’s source Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, The Cambridge Mediaeval History, The Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and other general reference works (212-213).
Gordon and Fletcher insist that whatever Yeats had found and read about
Byzantium in his English sources, in earlier years, had been fragmentary and
often trivial. Dalton’s book describes:
Its form does indeed evoke and quicken the sense of life, but it is a life
elect and spiritual, and not the tumultuous flow of human existence. They
are without the solidity of organisms which rejoice or suffer; they seem to
need no sun and cast no shadow, emerging mysteriously from some
radiance of their own. . . . It is greatest, it is most itself, when it frankly
renounces nature; its highest level is perhaps attained where, as in the best
mosaic, a grave schematic treatment is imposed, where no illusion of
receding distance, no preoccupation with anatomy, is suffered to distract the
eye from the central mystery of the symbol. The figures that ennoble these
walls often seem independent of earth; they owe much of their grandeur to
their detachment. They exert their compelling and almost magical power just
120 Hie Sup Choi
because they stand on the very line between that which lives and that
which is abstracted. (qtd in Gordon and Fletcher 135)
As cited above, we can surmise what Yeats thought and imagined while
writing “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium.” Yeats must have thought of
Byzantium as a spiritual city, especially the spiritual city of artists (Ellmann
& O’Clair 134).
Yeats’s Attachment to the Reality in “Sailing to Byzantium” 121
Yeats would live in the early Byzantium for a month if it were possible
for him, where the utmost beauty of art is born out of itself without any
labor or sacrifice needed to attain such kind of beauty. It is the beauty of an
ideal world, the beauty eternal and transcending the real world. It is the
beauty with no distinction between spirit and body, life and death. There
appears a golden bird that despises the complex and unpurged images of the
real world where everything is contradictory and changing as time passes; the
golden bird is static and lethargic and fixed in a place, though.
Yeats wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” when he was over sixty; it is not
difficult for us to imagine that Yeats may have felt the decrepitude of his
body and the disillusionment with the material world he could not trust. As
he despised the material world and bodily existence, it is natural that he
should long for the eternal world of art and spirit in Byzantium, the most
idealistic city. The longing for an eternal youth and ideal city is depicted in
this poem.
II
In the first line, the poet indicates the real world as “that” and admits that
he is old. That country is not suitable for him to live on. “That country” is
Ireland (Ellmann & O’Clair 134). Though he was born and lived in Ireland,
he no longer thinks Ireland is a good country for him to live, for he is old.
It is now a world for the young: that is, the world of body and carnal
desires. He is now on his way to the spiritual and intellectual world.
In “that country” the young seek sensual pleasure: they hug each other
and enjoy their youth, as birds sing of sensual pleasure. Yet, they belong to
dying generations, as they are destined to die sooner or later, just as fish,
birds, and animals do. Salmon come back to their birth place when they are
going to give birth to the next generation and mackerel gather together in the
sea. All the fish and animals and birds live their lives enjoying their fleshly
pleasure and do nothing but praise the present world without paying attention
to the spiritual world where none loses their lives and experiences birth and
growth and death. What they praise and enjoy is the ephemeral natural world
in which they suffer birth, growth, and death: it is a world, in which all the
living creature will disappear sooner or later.
Though Yeats claims that country is not for the old but for the young,
the description is very vivid and concrete. He is very conscious of the world
and in some respect has a strong attachment to the world. This is the
evidence that though he keeps avowedly a dualistic view of life, he seems to
firmly cling to reality, or the phenomenal world.
In the second stanza, an old man is compared to a scarecrow:
The speaker prays to the saints. The “sages” in the first line is a deliberate
change from saints, as if to secularize the vision; the fire and mosaic are
made so indissoluble that it is impossible to distinguish the metaphor from
the thing described (Ellmann & O’Clair 135). As the fire is “God’s holy
fire,” it neither blows out by wind nor can burn up all the unspiritual things.
The saints Yeats sees in his vision are the dwellers in the everlasting
heaven: the concrete images in the mosaic of Byzantine art. When Yeats
visited Rome with Mrs. Yeats in 1925, he concentrated on seeing the finest
examples of Early Christian art. After six weeks’ travel, he brought back
photographs of those monuments, such as the mosaic at La Zisa, Palermo. It
shows its two palm-trees between peacocks, flanking formalized fruit-bearing
trees with birds in the branches, emblems of immortality (Gordon and
Fletcher 133).
Gordon and Fletcher describe the mosaic:
The conventional forms of Byzantine mosaic seem to deny the nature from
which they derive. Those images, in fact, were designed to express the
Divine, the supernatural, the transcendent realm which opposes the flux of
time and nature. The personal application of the symbol is intensified by
Yeats’s obsession with old age, change, decay, and death, and with the
wisdom that outlasts them. The symbol, then expresses the permanence of
the artist in the perfection of his artifices; but it contains more than this,
for Byzantium, at its highest point, represented for Yeats a civilization in
Yeats’s Attachment to the Reality in “Sailing to Byzantium” 125
which all forms of thought, art, and life interpenetrated one another, and
where the artist “spoke to the multitude and the few alike.” (Fletcher 136)
Yeats here uses the images as a symbol of heaven. The speaker asks the
sages in the holy fire to whirl down from their timeless setting to his point
in time and burn up his heart (Ellmann & O’Clair 135). He also asks them
to be his teacher and teach his soul. As Curtis Bradford says, he now prays
to the wise of all ages and cultures who have entered before him eternity or,
as Yeats would have said, “the other life,” so that they become the singing
masters of his soul. Yeats’s protagonist beseeches the sages to leave
momentarily the holy fire which symbolizes their eternal ecstasy and to help
him put off the carnal desire and become a golden bird singing on a golden
bough (Bradford 112).
Yeats has a belief that he could get an eternal life through art. He seems
to have seen the possibility and wants to divest himself of the human
features which have animal’s character and get an eternal life (Kiwoong Han
107). In “The Tables of the Law,” Yeats spoke of “that supreme art which is
to win us from life and gather us into eternity like dove into their dove-cots”
(Ellmann & O’Clair 135).
Because the speaker is sick with carnal desire tied to the phenomenal
world, he asks the holy spirits of the saints to consume his heart away. As
the heart indicates his body tied to feelings, he wants to get out of the body
and become assimilated with the images of the saints with his spirit.
The next stanza explains why he wants to go into the eternal world of
art:
The bird must absolutely be a bird of artifice; the entire force of the poem
-
for Yeats depended upon this otherwise he would scarcely have bothered
about Moore’s characteristic, and of course intelligent, quibble. (103)
III
Notes
1) Poems are cited from William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London:
Macmillan, 1971).
128 Hie Sup Choi
Works cited
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Journal of Korea 35 (2011): 185-207.
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John Unterecker, ed. Yeats: A Collection of Critical Essays. (Twentieth
Century Views) Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall Inc., 1963: 93-130.
[Cheol Hwan, Woo. “Yeats’s ‘Byzantium’: Exposition of What?” The Yeats Journal
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Diggory, Terence. Yeats and American Poetry. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1983.
Ellmann, Richard. The Identity of Yeats. London: Faber and Faber, 1964.
Ellmann, Richard & Robert O’Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern
Poetry. New York: Norton, 1973.
Gordon, D. J. and Fletcher, Ian. “Byzantium.” John Unterecker, ed. Yeats: A
Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs,
N. J. : Prentice Hall Inc., 1963: 131-38.
Jeffares, A. Norman. A New Commentary on The Poems of W. B. Yeats. London:
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Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. New York: Macmillan, 1957.
[Ki Woong, Han. “Overcoming Limited Time by Yeats and Keats: Centered on
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(2007): 97-114.]
한기웅. 예이츠와 키이츠의 시간의 극복: 비잔티움으로의 항해 와 가을에게 를
중심으로 , 한국예이츠저널 27(2007): 97-114.
Lentricchia, Frank. The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of
W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.
Unterecker, John. A Reader’s Guide to W. B. Yeats. London: Thames and Hudson.
1959.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1971.
___. A Vision. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Yeats’s Attachment to the Reality in “Sailing to Byzantium” 129