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.
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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.
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