Literature Essays

Literature Essay on Byzantium Poems

Let us now look at Yeats’ Byzantium poems. Why Byzantium? we may ask. The Byzantium Empire was nearly exactly in the centre of Yeats’ two thousand year cycle; however, Byzantium is significant for Yeats for more than merely mathematical reasons.

The Roman Empire splits itself into two at around the fourth century BC. Constantine renames itself Constantinople and becomes the cultural omphalos of Europe. The Byzantine age represents a time when art and soul become one.

This is a world where culture, art and the soul are integrated. In Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats says that it is to this world that he would sail. The phrase “dying generations” effectively compresses ages of birth and death together. Yeats feels old in this poem (he feels “an aged man” in 1926) and he argues that he must sing not of the flesh, but of the soul, and such a “singing school” is in Byzantium.

There, “sages standing in God’s holy fire” are like immortal phoenix birds rising from the holy flames, “pern in a gyre”, and they “consume” the speaker’s heart and gather him “into the artifice of eternity”.

Freed from the earthly world, “out of nature”, the speaker can be immortal, imperishable in the form of a mechanical golden singing bird: he is a work of art himself.

As a piece of art, the eternal bird (the speaker) will sit on a “golden bough” and actually be one of the “monuments of unageing intellect” that he had admired. The ottava rima form functions to give us the illusion of cranking and winding the key in the back of the mechanical bird.

Sailing to Byzantium is written from the perspective of an uninitiated outsider who is preparing to leave the material, visible, bodily, world, for the immaterial, invisible, soul, world. In contrast, Byzantium is written from the perspective of an initiate observing uninitiated spirits arriving from beyond the sea representing the Byzantine world from the fleshly reality of modernity.

Literature Essays

• Example of Short Autobiography
• Romanticism and the Romantic
• The Rainbow
• Hamlet
• The Sandman, Turn Of The Screw
• Oedipus The King
• Post Modernism - The Passion of Eve
• Sophocles and Euripides Treatement of Orestei
• Feminist Theory and Dickens
• Seamus Heaney
• Modernist Writing Characters
• Medea and Clytemnestra
• Othello, Jew of Malta
• Byzantium poems
• Interpretation of Dreams
• Postmodernist Fiction
• Fertility Myths In Modern Literature
• In A Station of The Metro
• The Mill On The Floss

Please note: The above essays and dissertations were written by students and then submitted to us to display and help others. Thanks to all the students who have submitted their work to us.

Literature Essays

• Example of Short Autobiography
• Romanticism and the Romantic
• The Rainbow
• Hamlet
• The Sandman, Turn Of The Screw
• Oedipus The King
• Post Modernism - The Passion of Eve
• Sophocles and Euripides Treatement of Orestei
• Feminist Theory and Dickens
• Seamus Heaney
• Modernist Writing Characters
• Medea and Clytemnestra
• Othello, Jew of Malta
• Byzantium poems
• Interpretation of Dreams
• Postmodernist Fiction
• Fertility Myths In Modern Literature
• In A Station of The Metro
• The Mill On The Floss

Please note: The above essays and dissertations were written by students and then submitted to us to display and help others. Thanks to all the students who have submitted their work to us.