The Nightingale of Yeats and Andersen

In the poem ’Sailing to Byzantium’ we can discover a tale which is similar to one of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale ‘The Nightingale’. There’s the motif of the golden bird which sings forever, but Yeats’ and Andersen’s opinion about the values are different. In Andersen’s story the nightingale wants to be free so the Chinese emperor likes the mechanical bird better. But this fake nightingale breaks down one day and it is the little grey- feathered bird who can keep the emperor alive. The song of the nightingale frightens away the Death and the emperor’s good and bad deeds. At the end of the tale the little bird tells Andersen’s opinion to the emperor: he shouldn’t destroy the artificial bird, it did very well as long as it could. The nightingale won’t stay in the palace, it would be a prison to it. But it would come every time it feels like coming, and would sing to the emperor. Thus we can see that – according to Andersen – the true value is the real bird, the natural thing is better than the artificial. In Yeats’ poem we can see the contrary of Andersen’s viewpoint. In the first stanza the youth of the country is “caught in that sensual music” and they neglect the old, the “monuments of unageing intellect”. That’s why the poetic I decides to sail “to the holy city of Byzantium”. The old man is nothing but a “tattered coat upon a stick”, unless his soul can clap his hands and sing. In Byzantuim, he asks the sages to “be the singing-masters“ of his soul, which is “fastened to a dying animal” and desires to get rid of it. This dying animal is the mortal body of men, and Yeats wrotes that “the artifice of eternity” is a better place for souls. The poetic I doesn’t want to live in a natural form, “but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make”, for the hammered gold is more superior, more eloquent “to keep a drowsy Emperor awake”. This is the point when we can clearly see the similarity between the poem and the tale. This golden bird sets “upon a golden bough to sing” to the ladies and lords, just like the nightingale in the tale of Andersen. But this golden bird of Yeats doesn’t sing always the same song: it sings about “of what is past, or passing, or to come” – the past, the present and the future. According to Yeats the artificial song lives forever and raises the heart more than the natural forms of being. Andersen taught in his story that the natural thing has more values than those things that are made by human hands. This is the main difference between the poem and the tale.

Eszter Lévai BT-3AM