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Old Thursday, January 11, 2007
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Default W.b.yeats : Sailing To Byzantium

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.


A poem by William Butler Yeats, published in his collection October Blast in 1927 and considered one of his masterpieces. For Yeats, ancient Byzantium was the purest embodiment of transfiguration into the timelessness of art. Written when Yeats was in his sixties, the poem repudiates the sensual world in favour of "the artifice of eternity." It is known for its remarkable lyricism.


SUMMARY

The speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is "no country for old men": it is full of youth and life, with the young lying in one another's arms, birds singing in the trees, and fish swimming in the waters. There, "all summer long" the world rings with the "sensual music" that makes the young neglect the old, whom the speaker describes as "Monuments of unageing intellect."

An old man, the speaker says, is a "paltry thing," merely a tattered coat upon a stick, unless his soul can clap its hands and sing; and the only way for the soul to learn how to sing is to study monuments of its own magnificence." Therefore, the speaker has sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium." The speaker addresses the sages "standing in God's holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall," and asks them to be his soul's "singing-masters." He hopes they will consume his heart away, for his heart "knows not what it is"--it is "sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal," and the speaker wishes to be gathered "Into the artifice of eternity."

The speaker says that once he has been taken out of the natural world, he will no longer take his "bodily form" from any "natural thing," but rather will fashion himself as a singing bird made of hammered gold, such as Grecian goldsmiths make "To keep a drowsy Emperor awake," or set upon a tree of gold "to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Or what is past, or passing, or to come."


FORM
The four eight-line stanzas of "Sailing to Byzantium" take a very old verse form: they are metered in iambic pentameter, and rhymed ABABABCC, two trios of alternating rhyme followed by a couplet. Yeats contrasts images of dying and fecundity with "monuments of unaging intellect." He entreats the sages to gather his soul into immortal art, such as the precious metallic bird that sings


To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.


Like much of Yeats's work, the poem is laden with symbolism, including one of his favourite images, the spinning gyre" of fate. The poem has been interpreted as a metaphor for the poet's journey to an ideal afterlife, as a comment on artistic achievement, or both. It is grounded in literal meaning as well, for in 1924 the ailing Yeats left Ireland, "no country for old men," to view Byzantine mosaics in Italy.


COMMENTARY
"Sailing to Byzantium" is one of Yeats's most inspired works, and one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. It is Yeats's definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is "fastened to a dying animal" (the body). Yeats's solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city's famous gold mosaics (completed mainly during the sixth and seventh centuries) could become the "singing-masters" of his soul. He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could exist in "the artifice of eternity." In the astonishing final stanza of the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past ("what is past"), the present (that which is "passing"), and the future (that which is "to come").

A fascination with the artificial as superior to the natural is one of Yeats's most prevalent themes. In a much earlier poem, 1899's "The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart," the speaker expresses a longing to re-make the world "in a casket of gold" and thereby eliminate its ugliness and imperfection. Later, in 1914's "The Dolls," the speaker writes of a group of dolls on a shelf, disgusted by the sight of a human baby. In each case, the artificial (the golden casket, the beautiful doll, the golden bird) is seen as perfect and unchanging, while the natural (the world, the human baby, the speaker's body) is prone to ugliness and decay. What is more, the speaker sees deep spiritual truth (rather than simply aesthetic escape) in his assumption of artificiality; he wishes his soul to learn to sing, and transforming into a golden bird is the way to make it capable of doing so.
"Sailing to Byzantium" is an endlessly interpretable poem, and suggests endlessly fascinating comparisons with other important poems--poems of travel, poems of age, poems of nature, poems featuring birds as symbols. One of the most interesting is surely Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," to which this poem is in many ways a rebuttal: Keats writes of his nightingale,

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down"

It is important to note that the poem is not autobiographical; Yeats did not travel to Byzantium (which was renamed Constantinople in the fourth century A.D., and later renamed Istanbul), but he did argue that, in the sixth century, it offered the ideal environment for the artist. The poem is about an imaginative journey, not an actual one.


In his poem "Sailing to Byzantium", Yeats rejects his perceptions of the sensual mortal world and fondly imagines a paradise of intellectual intransience in Byzantium. The impermanence of human life is recounted, for Yeats who himself is a part of the "dying generation" creates a bittersweet tone underlying the depictions of vitality and youth in the poem. Derisive words indicative of death are strategically placed to cause the literal "music" of life to be interrupted, and yet the music is described as "sensual". It is exactly this quality that lures Yeats back to the world of human condition that he himself cannot escape. In purposefully creating this poem into "the artifice of eternity" that will stand as a monument of his own "unageing intellect", Yeats attempts to create his own golden future. This is impossible however, for his intellect succumbs to the very appeals of his senses that alienate him from the "young in one another's arm" and the "song" of the "birds in the trees". The narrator is not able to deliberately release the unexplained complexities within himself that have kept him "sick with desire", but instead focuses his attentions on the failure of his own physical body, for he repeatedly fixates on the image of his intellect "fastened to a dying animal". In this "paltry" condition, he is now able to project his illusions of perfect yet impossible visions upon this text to illuminate himself in the grandiose context of transformed "magnificence" --- His transcendence into all that makes Byzantium the sacred center of intellectualism.


In the first stanza, Yeats depicts a world in which a distance exists between himself and the present reality of his mortal existence. In his "mortal dress", Yeats exists as a ragged old man who has nothing to offer the corporeal world with his physical body. In an effort to escape to a place of intellectualism that will not restrain him as his earthly "country [not] for old men" does, the poem physically progresses as Yeats' journey to Eternity occurs. He is the sole creator of Byzantium, for his experience in this city merely exists in his own imaginings. The reader's perception of truth is simply a reflection of Yeats' fabricated truth, and is therefore rendered unreliable. Yeats yearns for the timeless and undying form, and the words he uses to diametrically oppose his two lives the one he has of ephemeral importance and the one he wants of everlasting art and intellect--- exist in the very language he uses. The cycle of human life is recorded in words comprised of either one or two syllables. This creates short, choppy phrases that produce a harmony that is staccato in nature. Yeats recounts the song of "dying generations" and immediately goes on to describe the "Fish, flesh, or fowl [that] commend all summer long" whereas in describing Eternity he honors his conceptions using polysyllabic vocabulary as can be observed in the line "monuments of unageing intellect". The sensual tones flow effortlessly across the tongue, whereas in describing the reality of his present state, Yeats joins words in union that create a rough, irregular tone. The disjointed, staccato meter produces an urgency that can only be explained in the "sick... desire" for Yeats to escape his mortal life. The music is what connects the two very different worlds of intellect and sensory, and through the structure of the poem can the reader sense Yeats' longing for Eternity. It is this ache that determines his word choice, for it is the sound that is produced from the sustained notes of polysyllabic words of passion and "desire" that resonate throughout the poem--- not the author's depiction of Byzantium itself. Yeats separates himself from the physical world, and yet his soul cannot penetrate the life of Byzantium for which it lusts, for "out of nature" Yeats must fall and death must occur in order for Eternity to become his reality.


Yeats rejects his natural shape, and yet in attaining the form achieved in living in Eternity, his "monument of unageing intellect" becomes undying and his "golden bough to sing" remains fixed and unchanging. Yeats is unable to be transformed by the city, for it is Byzantium's very charm that prevents him from existing with the human conditions that are responsible for creating the intellect that Yeats now strives to preserve. Only Yeats, in a moment of artistic vision, can speak to his 'reality' of Byzantium, for the lack of metaphorical and literal progression would cause the reader, a member of the sensual world, to reject the lifeless "gold mosaic" of unfeeling, dead words. Yeats endeavors to be a "hammered gold and gold enamel[ed]" bird pleasantly amusing an Emperor, and yet the realities of existing in Eternity are that a drowsy Emperor will forever remain drowsy and not ever be excitable, as will the song Yeats sings be forever unchanging and static. Yeats shuns his mortal world because of the rejection he faces as an ageing man, and yet in Byzantium, Yeats only imagines his paradise to be a place in which he will be able to successfully appeal to the senses of others. The poem culminates in a situation in which Yeats receives attention from the ladies of Byzantium, and yet it is by alluring the senses of these ladies and the lords and the Emperor of Byzantium that Yeats imagines himself to be of a form that is not a "monument of unageing intellect", but simply a golden, evocative form now physically capable of engaging the sensory appeals of others.


Yeats finds himself in fully functioning form, singing in full "golden" tunes not unlike the mortal "young in one another's arms" presumably making love. In finally receiving the attention he has been alienated from since the very first stanza, Yeats finds himself "coming" but protected by the "holy fire". In Byzantium, hiding behind the call for lasting intellectualism, Yeats make his body unnatural relative to his former physical self, for in the human world, Yeats likens his body to that of a "dying animal". "Once out of nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing" he declares, and so in images of himself in Byzantium does he envision his exterior to be physically hardened by his precious metal enameling. He transforms himself into a bird known for its golden sheen, and thus acquires a type of superficial elegance that is not a part of the intellectual appeal he once claimed to hold as his utmost priority. In this transformation does Yeats' craving for the decadence of grandeur that appeals to the very physical senses make itself manifest, for he strives to become what as a "tattered" old man he lacks. Now he is free to compete with the music that the young lovers make, for in Byzantium, Yeats merely reinvents himself and proceeds to envision Eternity as the sensory world he once rejected. His body and soul are interconnected in Byzantium, and he calls to be physically "gathered" for his mind "knows not what [his body] is". Like a virgin, his body is at the mercy of the entity that 'gathers' him, and he is taken into the sexually charged "artifice of eternity" where he later "comes". His own song is now enough to rouse the senses of the Emperor of Byzantium as well as compete with the lovers' song. Yeats carefully chooses the words which he sings, for in specifying "what is past, or passing or to come", Yeats uses the words "past" and "passing" to create a lulling effect that can only be countered by the ending staccato pulse of the word "come." The poem culminates in this very moment, for in Yeats' literal coming, his future is a symbolic orgasm which secures his ability to be sexually satisfied.


It is as a sexually capable being that Yeats is able to secure his place in Eternity, the haven of intellectualism, and yet in gaining this fertility, he figuratively gains reproductive abilities that he is incapable of using. The dead irony of the situation is that while Yeats "sailed the seas" and quite literally 'came' in Byzantium, he is unable to release his manifest ideas that produce the intellect he wishes to preserve. In Byzantium he is set upon becoming an everlasting beauty of great thought, and yet by singing a never changing song, he will forever exist as an archaic machine of past pleasantries. In order to continually "keep a drowsy Emperor awake", change must persist, and yet change is the very quality that has not only created an aging Yeats, but has also condemned him to the human life cycle. Yeats recounts the mortal life where "whatever is begotten, born and dies", for it is in Yeats' mortal life that he has become a part of "those dying generations". In describing that which he previously heralded as the problem of the human condition, he outlines his own failure in successfully being transformed by Byzantium, for he is unable to reject the very senses he idealizes. He appeals to the "sages standing in God's holy fire" as one would call to a muse for inspiration and creativity, and yet despite these sages becoming the "singing-masters of [his] soul", the thoughts he gains from them can only be contained within his internal flames. This lack of expression causes his thoughts to "consume his heart away", and yet his mind, pregnant with thought, is still unable to release the complexities that exist within him. Like a "perne in a gyre" his mind is spinning around and around constantly, yet Yeats is simply a bird of "unnatural" form, producing a harmony that although may be melodious, will forever remain sterile in its ingenuity and vision.


In gaining an eternity in time, Yeats is locked mechanically into the "artifice of eternity", and Byzantium exists more as a physical process of transformation than as a "holy city" of complete intelligence. Yeats rejects the mortal, fertile world for refusing him the opportunity to symbolically 'reproduce' his art, and yet he gains virility in the intellectually sterile city of Byzantium. By the end of the poem, the tension builds between the need for the reproduction of creative expression and its impossibility, and the everlasting sense of time is strictly divided into the "past... passing" and the implied future. Byzantium cannot eternalize Yeats' genius, for the reader must envision a city so basic that the very complexities that exist as a mere byproduct of the human condition fail to exist, and it is this very anomaly that reflects in the absurdity of the old man Yeats' desire in quite literally "Sailing to Byzantium”. Yeats is faced with the biggest paradox, for he wishes to become the form that is essential to perfect art, yet despises the very senses without whose perceptions, perfect art could not exist.
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