W.B. Yeats’s Byzantium

Yeats’s writings are ambiguous, they lead to many interpretations, and it is important for his readers to find their own widsom in Yeats’s creations. He reminds us what it means to be an artist of uncompromising conscience, the changeless work of art. (Ross, xvii). His poetry forms our souls, he puts his thoughts into symbolic acts and he reminds us what it means to be human.

William Butler Yeats is an important personality for Irish culture, he initiated its revival and he played a part in securing Ireland’s Independence. He supported the treaty that both ended the Anglo-Irish War and the instigated civil war. His aspiration was to reestablish Ireland’s hereditary mythology and to redeem the nation from the slough of modernity (Ross, 10), so he incorporates mythic, folkloric and local elements in his writings. Yeats also helped founding the Irish Literary Society of London and National Literary Society of Dublin, to improve Irish culture and letters.

Byzantium was published in 1932, in the volume Words for Music Perhaps, four years after he published Sailing to Byzantium in the volume The Tower. Although Byzantium is published in 1932, it is dated 1930. There exists a diary record from April 30 th in which he puts the main ideas of the poem: ”Describe Byzantium as it is in the system towards the end of the first Christian millennium. A walking mummy. Flames at the street corners where the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees, in the harbour, offering their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry them to Paradise.”1 (Ross, 62) Yeats finds the image of his own era and a context in which he pust his witty ideas, in a perfect language.

In the first stanza, the night has fallen, but it doesn’t purify the world, even if the images of the day recede, they remain unpurged. The Emperor’s drunken soldiery represent the social disorder, like the British soldiers who fought in Ireland, so it can be a memory of the Anglo-Irish War. The night-walkers may be the easy women, the soldiers’ counterparts. Their song is antithetical to the one of the great cathedral gong, which represents the primal energy with a cathartic function. The two songs express the antithesis between heaven and earth, human and superhuman. The dome, starlit or moonlit is the perfection, everything that the human being is not. It might be compared to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, where the pleasure-dome can be interpreted as the imagination, the sacred place where the act of creation starts. In this way, Yeats’s dome may be the perfect mind, who despises all human weaknesses, the imagination which can create everything that in the human world is impossible to achieve.

In the second stanza, there appears a figure neither man nor shade, a floating image, the superhuman, which may be interpreted as the product of the imagination, the vision. Here appears the motif of the mummy, the ancient, eternal, unhuman wisdom, a metaphor for the mind. Through imagination, ecstasy can be achieved, it leaves you breathless, so the mummy generates extraordinary ideas, it summons breathless mouths, it’s a supernatural experience, the produced ecstasy is the man’s communion with eternity. Man can achieve eternal power through his imagination, his creativity, his art.

The third stanza is counterpart to the second one, where the bird is like a miracle that belongs neither to life, nor to art, it can be the artist’s thought. By the fact that it Can like the cocks of Hades crow, the bird is an apocalyptic agent, it is symapthetic with the moonlit dome from the first stanza,

1 Ideas mentioned in Yeats’s diary record, quoted by David A. Ross in his Critical Companion to Willian Butler Yeats- a Literary Reference to His Life and Work.

the bird is by the moon embittered, it refuses anything but perfection, just like an artist wants its creation to be perfect.

In the fourth stanza it is mentioned the witching hour, the midnight, or the hour when miracles take place, the streets flicken with uncanny flames, which draw blood-begotten spirits. The fire is a purgatorial one, so the spirits are absolved of all complexities of fury of evil, so the order in nature is reestablished. This stanza can also be interpreted as working on the act of creation, where the artist purifies his art from all the imperfections, the flames makes it perfect. The triple metaphors, dance, trance, flame express the same deepening into the unity of self (Ross, 63), the essential rebirth and the essential salvation. The agony of flame represents the conflagration of the soul, we can escape from earthly constraints, entering into a state of mind where the fuel has become flame, where your power is limitless, like the imagination of the human beings, where constraints don’t exist. We can obtain this state of mind through creation or enjoyment of an work of art, but that moment of eternity passes, it’s not possible for human mind to keep it.

In the last stanza, these spirits straddle the dolphins in the symbolic expression of their victory over mire and blood (Ross, 64), so art is the organized expression of the transcendent agony, the poem ends with a declaration of aesthetic faith (Ross, 64). The poem’s fnal lines represent a compression of ideas, the furies of complexity are the infinite ramifications of image by which the self conscious mind, the anima mundi, overwhelms the attempt at redemptive intensity. The last image of the dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea, covers the natural life, the sea is dolphin-torn and gong-tormented momentarily disturbed by our sexual or religious or artistic aspiration but not altered in its massive and inscrutable inertia—implies that the serene finality of “Sailing to Byzantium” is misplaced; that the struggle to “break the flood” is the impossibility by which we rouse ourselves to miracle.(Ross, 64) In fact, it exposes the idea that we can obtain salvation through our aspirations. In mythology, the dolphins were the ones which carried the souls of tht dead ones on the sea through afterlife, so we are tormented by our aspirations, we want to keep that ecstatic moment for eternity, so we can obtain spiritual redemption through the timelessness of art.