“Sailing to Byzantium,” First Published in 1928 As Part of Yeats's

1 T D C Part III Hons. Paper-6 Palgrave’s Golden Treasury CRITICAL EVALUATIONS 1. Sailing to Byzentium “Sailing to Byzantium,” first published in 1928 as part of Yeats's collection, The Tower, contains only four stanzas and yet is considered to be one of the most effective expressions of Yeats's arcane poetic “system,” exploring tensions between art and ordinary life and demonstrating how, through an imaginative alchemy, the raw materials of life can be transformed into something enduring. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the artist/speaker transforms himself into a work of art, and, in so doing, obscures the distinction between form and content and the artist and his work. “Sailing to Byzantium” is widely admired for its inventive, evocative imagery and masterfully interwoven phrases. Literary critic Frank Kermode calls the poem “a marvelously contrived emblem of what Yeats took the work of art to be.” “Sailing to Byzantium,” a lyric poem, has neither conventional characters nor plot. The poem consists of four open-form stanzas and features a speaker who may be thought of, as Richard Ellmann suggests, as “a symbol of Yeats and of the artist and of man.” The action of the poem concerns the problem of immersing oneself in life and at the same time striving for permanence. The opening stanza describes a state of youth, a sensuous, sometimes violent, life with emphasis on productivity and regeneration (“That is no country for old men”), and then contrasts this sensuality with the intellectual and the transitory with the permanent: “Caught in that sensual music all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.” Acknowledging both his mortality and desire for transcendence, the speaker prepares his soul for the body's death by “studying / Monuments of its own magnificence” and “sail[s] the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” In Byzantium, the speaker hopes to fuse the “sensual music” with the “monuments,” that is, the passing pleasures with transcendent art. In 1931, Yeats wrote that he chose to “symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city” because “Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy.” In Byzantium, the speaker encounters a world of timeless art and spirituality, represented by sages and “God's holy fire” with flames and smoke twisting like a “perne in a gyre,” an allusion to Yeats's cyclical theory of history and transcendence. The speaker wishes to lose his heart, “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal,” and 2 have his soul gathered “into the artifice of eternity” so that “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing.” In the last stanza, the speaker imagines himself transformed into a work of art that transcends the passing of time, a Byzantine work of art, a golden bird that is animate in that it sings to the Emperor, but inanimate as a work of art that will survive generations. The tension between art and life is an essential dichotomy in Yeats's poetry. Yeats envisioned the artist as a kind of alchemist, whose transformative art obscures the distinction between “the dancer and the dance,” as he wrote in the poem, “Among School Children.” For Yeats, only through imagination could the raw materials of life be transformed into something enduring. Thus “Sailing to Byzantium” has at least two symbolic readings, both mutually interdependent upon the other. The poem is both about the journey taken by the speaker's soul around the time of death and the process by which, through his art, the artist transcends his own mortality. An important symbol in “Sailing to Byzantium” is the ancient city of Byzantium, which in the fifth and sixth centuries was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and the center of art and architecture. Byzantine art did not attempt to represent human forms, and so, for Yeats, Byzantium symbolized a way of life in which art is celebrated as artifice. Furthermore, Byzantium represents what Yeats, in A Vision, calls “Unity of Being,” in which “religious, aesthetic and practical life were one” and art represented “the vision of a whole people.” By 1928, the year he published “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats was, in his own words, “a smiling sixty-year-old public man” with a senate career and the Nobel Prize behind him. With the publication of that poem in the volume The Tower, Yeats's contemporaries noticed a change of style and maturity, as the poems in that volume not only reflected Yeats's satisfaction with a long, fulfilling life but also, according to A. Norman Jeffares, a “sharpened apprehension, brought by Ireland's civil war, of approaching conflagration in the world, and, by approaching age, of ruin and decay.” Yeats's contemporaries generally agreed that his technique was stunning, but viewed his ideas on poetry and history to be eccentric. An early critic, T. Sturge Moore, told Yeats in 1930 that he found the first three stanzas “magnificent” but believed the fourth to “weaken to an ineffective and unnecessary repetition of ‘gold’ four times in as many lines, … implying that the contrast between artificial and natural forms is fundamental, which is obviously not the case.” In 1931, Harriet Monroe, the publisher of the 3 influential Poetry magazine, likened the emotional quality of the poem's language and imagery to that of Shakespeare's drama, especially the monologues of Lear. (2) Among School Children For Yeats's biographer, Richard Ellmann, “Sailing to Byzantium represents a poetic “climax” for Yeats The speaker paces around a classroom, looking at the schoolchildren. The nun says that what they learn in school is to read and to sing. They learn about history, sewing, and how to be neat “in a modern way.” The children stare at the speaker, an old politician. He dreams of a Leda-like body bent over a fire in a domestic scene. She is telling a story of how a small interaction with a child turned its day to tragedy. Together, over the story, they share a great deal. Looking at the children, he wonders what she was like at their age. He sees her as a child and is mad with love. Her current, gaunt image comes to mind. She once was pretty, but she is now comfortable and old. Did the speaker’s mother, when carrying him, know that seeing this woman would be enough compensation for her child’s birth? Plato thought nature to be imperfect; Aristotle contemplated the nature of things, as did Pythagoras...but these are all merely subjects for students to study. Nuns and mothers adore images, but the mothers’ images are their children. The speaker questions life’s very location, wondering what part of a tree is the essence of the tree, what part of a dancer is a dancer, and which is the dance itself. The subject matter of schoolchildren contrasts greatly with that of the earlier historical poems in this collection. Here is evidence of civil society, of progress, and of modernity - none of which were possible during the Anglo- Irish War or the Civil War. From this, and from the implication that the speaker is a senator (as Yeats was after 1924), one may deduce that this is a later poem, written from the standpoint of a more peaceful Ireland. The children are poignant for the speaker because they are associated both with an obvious type of innocence and with the woman whom the speaker loves. By comparing her child self and her current incarnation, it is sharply evident to the speaker how she has aged. The imagined conversation between the two, in which she seems to be a schoolteacher rather than a revolutionary, is wishful thinking on his part. Yeats’ musings on whether it was destined that he 4 should fall in love with this woman is related to “Leda and the Swan” in that it presupposes a series of events that must come to pass. The final stanza is a philosophical riddle concerning whether man acts or is acted upon, and serves as a connection to Yeats' uncertainty as to whether he loves or was destined to love. ‘Among School Children’ by W.B Yeats was published in 1928 in the collection ‘The Tower’. Being among school children, Yeats confronts the problem of human frailty, by reflecting on the impact and the worth of his life. The poem is a first person narrative, with a conversational tone. Throughout he compares Maud Gonne’s current appearance to her physical appearance in her youth, this is where he realises how time effects the physical being. This poem has roman numerals which number each stanza – highlighting formality. The poem begins by Yeats walking “through the long schoolroom”, which metaphorically could reflect the school of life. He then uses the verb “questioning;” to highlight that he is questioning are lessons really relevant to life? However, amongst youth itself, Yeats notices his age and therefore perceives himself as a “sixty-year-old smiling public man”. He desires to know whether his education is similar to the children, who now learn in the “best modern way”. While he questions whether lessons that are being taught are really relevant to life he learns that they “learn to cipher and to sing, to study reading-books and histories”. This is where Yeats understands that life’s true lessons are not from the classroom as learning to “be neat in everything” is ironic and unrealistic. Whilst observing the innocent children he begins to visualise imagines of the “Ledaean body”. He envisions this “trivial event that changed some childish day to tragedy” and also strategically uses line eleven for the first alteration in meter which is parallel to the change in Leda’s life from innocence to knowledge.

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