Sailing To Byzantium by W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats is an Irish poet. He passed through three phases in his artistic development as a poet. In his early career, he starts as a very delicate romantic poet who travels through imagination to unknown mysterious worlds of courtly love and romance. His soul then was strongly connected to Maud Gonne,
an Irish patriot for whom Yeats dedicated most of his poetry of the Romantic phase. He loved Gonne so truly for 25 years and asked her hand several times without any use. She told him that if she accepted to marry him, his poetry for the Irish revolution would stop. Well, She married twice before her death in 1953. The second phase in Yeats’ artistic development is the Revolutionary when he produced poetry for the Irish cause of independence from the British crown. The revolutionaries themselves considered him their spokesman. However he changed his stand towards the Irish cause later when he thought that the revolution had gone into a wrong way of terrorism and unjustified bloodshed.it lost its true spirit. One of his poems that are very famous in support of the revolutionaries is “ Easter 1916”.
“ Sailing to Byzantium” belongs to Yeats’ third phase of artistic development wherein he appears much quiet and pensive and undecipherable. This phase is often referred to as the Symbolic phase. In this last phase which closed the poet’s life, Yeats speaks like a seer using symbols, signs and allusions: an allusion is a subtle learned reference to historic or past events, names and places. The word Byzantium is a good example of this allusive technique the poet uses. Byzantium is a real place in the past, but now it is nowhere: its name was changed hundreds years ago. We cannot understand why the poet refers to Byzantium in particular as an optimum ideal place unless we read the comparison he makes with the present.
The poem falls into four stanzas. In the first stanza , Yeats makes a comparison between the young generation and old men. He refers to the young generation of his time and the poet stand in modern society. The young people swarm the cities hand in hand , friends and girlfriends like birds making love on trees. The poet calls them a” dying generation” whose spirit is zero. Like fish, they are without any goal in life other than making love, giving birth to children and die. T.S. Eliot also refers to this meaninglessness in one of his poems saying “ birth, copulation and death”. Caught in this never ending cycle of life, the young generation neglects poets’ and other men of culture’s achievements: Yeats calls all men of letters as “ unageing intellect”: poets do never get old since they have an active intellect and imagination to enlighten their life, Yeats seems to suggest.
In the second stanza, Yeats continues his comparison and how the young generation looks at (old) poets. He says that an old man is of no importance for young people. An old man is like a worn out piece of clothes hanging on a stick in a farm to frighten birds. As such, an old man is lifeless and neglected as the young people wrongly think. The young people look at appearances forgetting that appearances are deceptive. The poet clarifies that the body ( appearance) is just a “mortal dress” while the soul of every poet is always singing and clapping its hands for life. Poets-- instead of being read and studied by the young people-- read and study themselves. It is absurd and meaningless when a poet reads his own poetry to amuse himself! Therefore, Yeats suggests that it is better for him to leave this squalid reality and sail to Byzantium. Now it is clear why Yeats chooses Byzantium as his final resort or stop. Back in history, in Byzantium, like it was in Athens for philosophers, poets were highly respected. Hence, he calls that city as a holy place and the present is a mundane godless place.
In the third stanza, the poet looks at a “ mosaic” painting in which there is a group of wise men standing inside fire: the fire of knowledge. He wishes to be with them in that burning fire so that to get rid of his “ sick animal”—his body. That mosaic is a symbol for immortality and this is the reason why he wants to be part of that mosaic. Another reading of this mosaic is that it contains people who are being purged by God’s holy fire so that they become immortal with God after purgation. The poet wants to be there in that fire which later leads to immortality.
In the last stanza, the poet’s sailing to Byzantium is over. He arrives at the shores of that holy city. In the first two lines, Yeats comments on the Catholic belief of Incarnation in which dead people go back to this life, but in different forms. Yeats refuses this Christian belief. He says that once he dies “ out of nature”, he will never come back to this life in any form of a living creature. He prefers to come back in an inanimate form , like for example, a bird made of gold to sing for lords and ladies of Byzantium. Here, the poet is alluding to an imaginary Byzantine tree made of gold on which several golden birds are fixed. When the wind hits the tree, the birds will move around themselves producing music. These birds are not living and they will never die like other living creatures. Here again the poet is looking for immortality.
The poet’s suffering here is applicable to our personal lives. When we do not find somebody to take care of us or pay attention to our ideas, we will immediately think of changing our life and leave the place where we are. Some people travel, others change their work place, or change their friends, or even …..
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