Sailing to Byzantium SUMMARY. Characters. The speaker, undertaking the journey to Byzantium

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1 Sailing to Byzantium Characters The speaker, undertaking the journey to Byzantium Inhabitants of Byzantium: sages, lords, ladies (see stanzas 3-4) Young and old people, flora and fauna of the earth (see stanza 1) SUMMARY Plot The poem is composed of four stanzas. The first stanza describes the natural world of living, loving, and reproduction; although these "generations" are "dying" they seem to be oblivious to their fate and thus are involved in their world. In the second stanza the theme of old age is discussed. The improvement of the soul and the uselessness of the flesh are also central themes, and the speaker first mentions his desire to go to Byzantium, once the ancient capital of the Roman Empire and the center of Mediterranean culture. In stanza 3 the spirits of Byzantium are addressed and the theme of immortality is discussed. Stanza four further explores the theme of immortality and perfection in an artistic creation. Style for "Sailing to Byzantium" The structure of "Sailing to Byzantium" gives the poem its "movement," as each stanza logically builds upon its predecessor, from temporal life to old age and finally to an evocation of a state of existence beyond the confines of birth and death. In this way the structure implies a complete and holistic symbol of eternal life. Despite the tremendous breadth of its subject, the poem is elegant and concise, with a careful, tight structure. Its verse form is called ottava rima: each stanza contains eight lines each, and all the stanzas conform to an abababcc rhyme scheme. In this form, the standout nature of the final couplet, which breaks the rhyming pattern, "has a special witty snap to it" (Abrams 2589), and often serves to either propel the "narrative" of the poem, or to provide a summation of the preceding lines. Many lines are strictly iambic (consisting of five two-syllable beats in which the first syllable of each beat is weakly accented and the second syllable is strongly accented); others vary slightly in stress, and can be considered "loosely iambic." This poem was first published in The Tower (1928); this highly praised collection is an example of his most mature work. Themes and Motifs

2 Unity of Being: The central theme of Yeats' poetry is the conflict between the ideal and the real. In A Vision Yeats outlined his philosophical response to this dualistic problem, a response that depends in large part on the symbol of the sphere. For Yeats the sphere represents the unity of being, or a unified "truth" beyond the chaos of opposition (in other contexts Yeats referred to this transcendent stance as "tragic-joy"). The sphere symbol is comprised of pairs of interpenetrating gyres (also called cones or vortexes), and these are in a state of continual conflict with one another while simultaneously emerging from one another. The gyres stand for the continual opposition between the basic elements of existence; e.g. the sun and the moon, day and night, life and death, man and woman, permanence and change. Unity of being is a state of enlightenment that is simultaneously involved with the turmoil of the mundane; in other words, unity of being is paradoxically both transcendent and manifest in the world. The Collective Unconscious: Yeats wrote of his belief in three doctrines: (1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy; (2) That the borders of our memories are shifting, and that our memories are a part of a great memory, the memory of Nature herself; (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols (qtd. in Dyson 25). Another way of thinking about this philosophy is to identify it as a kind of "collective unconscious," a concept that plays an important role in Yeats' poetry. This term refers to the Jungian idea that all human beings share, at an unconscious level, a basic vocabulary of images, or "archetypes," that help to give meaning to experience. For instance, "The Second Coming," with its apocalyptic vistas, employs images that are archetypal in this sense (consider for instance the circling "desert birds" of line 17). The collective unconscious, which lies beyond individual consciousness, is also an important symbol of the interrelatedness of human life, and thus is closely aligned with Yeats' Unity of Being. Magic: Yeats' belief in the supernatural-a belief originating in the Romantic revolt against scientific, hyper-rational conceptions of the world-provides an alternative to conventional forms of rationality and a response to the modern loss of meaning. Yeats was convinced that change was imminent in the modern world, and that we would develop an understanding that "natural and supernatural are knit together" and thus construct a "new science" to explain the workings of our universe (Dyson 25). His theory was to culminate in his book A Vision. Art: Yeats espoused a comprehensive theory of art that embraced all forms, including the visual and the musical. Expressions of this theory abound in his work; for instance, the diction, rhythm, and rhyme of his poetry are meant to consciously evoke music. Further, the poet frequently treats the subject of art itself, seeing in it, as did his Romantic precursors, a permanence that often satisfied his philosophical search for unity and balance (in that art can transcend the conflict of opposites in mortal existence), and occasionally even functioned as a replacement for the imperfection of life. Alienation and the Search for Meaning: A Modernist poet, Yeats was concerned with the existential crisis in society and the search for new foundations of meaning. In the early twentieth century the Western world had been shaken by events like the First World War and the growth of secularism, and by new advances in scientific, philosophical, medical, and other fields of knowledge. Traditional values and systems of truth had been questioned by thinkers like Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche, and the intelligentsia was in the process of reevaluating definitions of self, knowledge, and morality. The result was general disillusionment and uncertainty, and Yeats, like other modernists, spent much of his career searching for alternative definitions of truth, and alternative means of transcendence. Symbolic Systems: Symbolism is crucial to Yeats' work. His symbols can be thought of as many-sided crystals, which "grow slowly from solutions of traditions, from the dissolved

3 thoughts of many minds" (Henn 146). They are contexts of meaning, allowing for multiple interpretations and variations within themselves. Yeats relies on them so much because for him they compensated for the modern loss of spirituality; Yeats felt it was the artist's role to reinvest tired symbols (some of his most common include the sun, the moon, towers, masks, trees, and birds) with transcendent meaning. When properly utilized, they could also work together to create the mystical "unity" that Yeats strove for in his work. As Unterecker puts it: "when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become as it were one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion" (Unterecker 32). Historical Repetition: Yeats viewed history as cyclical. By observing nature he posited an endlessly repeating pattern of twenty-eight phases (corresponding to the phases of the moon). Yeats described this view in detail in a prose work entitled A Vision, where he conceived of a great wheel with twenty-eight spokes that correspond to all things. For Yeats the cycle of history included a movement from the "primary" to the "antithetical": the "primary" is associated with primeval darkness and the coarseness of the first day of creation, the "antithetical" with refinement and light. The abovementioned "gyres" (see "The Search for Unity of Being") correspond to the historical cycles. As one age begins to decline, so the next age is born within the dying spiral of the previous gyre; thus, thesis and antithesis are continually in simultaneous progress. HIGHLIGHTS The Title The title expresses a desire for a unity of experience that is not "caught" in the "sensual music" (7) of temporal existence. In part this desire is expressed by the word "sailing," indicating a journey toward this goal; more significantly, this desire is represented by the reference to the ancient city of Byzantium, which had intense, multi-layered symbolic value for Yeats. Byzantium was founded in 600 B.C.; it would be renamed Constantinople in A.D. 330, after which it became the capitol city of the Eastern Roman Empire (A.D ) (today it is the city of Istanbul). Byzantium was a cultural meeting ground for East and West, and, during its heyday, a center for the arts and sciences. In A Vision Yeats states that if he could spend a month in the ancient world he would choose Byzantium, reasoning: "I think that in Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one, that architect and artificers spoke to the multitude and the few alike" (qtd. in Simmons 59). For Yeats Byzantium represented a moment in history during which the gap between art and everyday life was either nonexistent or minimal; presumably, then, it symbolizes a state of mind in which all things are possible, and where dualities are resolved into a perfect unity of being. Stanza 1 The poem begins with a reference to the temporal world of living and dying. The beginning of the first line ["That is no country for old men" (1)] is famously anticlimactic and even arguably "unpoetic." Instead of opening ambiguously, it baldly and unemotionally presents a decisive conclusion about an unnamed place. Note the unemotional effect of choppy, monosyllabic words (except for the word "country"). Finally, note that the first line doesn't end with this

4 statement but follows it with the phrase "The young." This placement of the introductory phrase of another sentence at the end of the first line drives the eye on to the next line, away from "the old men" and onto a discussion of "the young." The second line expresses love as experienced by young people, and is followed by natural images of fertility and the cycle of life. Note how this scene of Edenic abundance ("birds in the trees," "[t]he salmon falls, the mackerelcrowded seas") is simultaneously interrupted by the image of death. Consider the interjection of the third line ["Those dying generations" (3)] and the process referred to in line 6 ["Whatever is begotten, born, and dies" (6)]. Such references recall the reality of death in the midst of life, and foreshadow the meditation on death that will come in the second stanza. There is a sense of compression in the juxtaposition of birth and death in these lines. "Dying generations," for instance, encapsulates the notion of death, while, taken by itself, the word "generation" (which also means creation) seems to refer to life. The phrase thus sums up the process of temporal existence that the speaker wishes to journey away from. The final couplet of the stanza suggests an opposition between the sensual world ["that sensual music" (7)] described in preceding lines and the "Monuments of unageing intellect" (8) that are seemingly ignored by the youthful. Given Yeats' concern with temporality, the word "unageing" seems important. It may suggest that the "Monuments of intellect" are somehow outside of the cycle of birth and death described in the preceding lines. This makes their neglect all the more telling. Stanza 2 The second stanza moves on to discuss old age, describing an old man as little more than a scarecrow. Symbolic Systems; Alienation and the Search for Meaning: The scarecrow image clearly conveys the picture of loss of vitality and life, and perhaps a loss of meaning as well. It is an image that Yeats returned to often in his poetry (see, for example, "Among School Children"). Despite the decrepitude implied by this image, the word "unless" hints at other possibilities: the old scarecrow can possibly be revived, if "[s]oul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing" (11). Unity of Being: The image of a "soul singing" seems to imply that death can be overcome if the eternal is contemplated and understood. Note that the singing here is different from the singing of the birds and the "sensual music" of stanza one. It is not, in other words, merely physical; references to the soul's "clapping" and "singing" suggest instead the union of physical and metaphysical. Also important is the idea of music as an "ethereal" art form (i.e., one which, for Yeats anyway, does not reside in an artifact like a painting or a building). Singing and music become symbols for the expression of a different order of experience, one directly related to a nondualistic vision of reality. At the same time, singing is an accessible, recognizable activity common to all human cultures. The poet adds that there is no worldly school for learning this singing of the soul, only those that study "[m]onuments of [their] own magnificence" (14).

5 The "monuments" referred to in this stanza can be negatively compared to the "[m]onuments of unageing intellect" with which Yeats ended stanza one. There, the word "monument" was used metaphorically to represent the higher vision of existence neglected by those engaged in the purely sensual. Here, "monument" seems to be used more literally (and more critically) to signify the self-obsession (and thus shortcomings) of "singing schools." At the end of this stanza the speaker refers for the first time in the body of the poem to the goal of sailing to "the holy city of Byzantium." Ending this stanza with the goal stated in the title connects this goal to the speaker's ideal of achieving a unified state of existence. Stanza 3 The first line of this stanza addresses the sages (presumably inhabitants of Byzantium, where the speaker has now arrived) who stand in "God's holy fire" (17). Magic: The "sages" of this stanza are, presumably, mystical masters of the kind of esoteric knowledge that Yeats studied assiduously. In this context it is also important to note that Byzantium had specific magical significance for Yeats, in that the high state of Byzantine artistic life occurred in the center of a two-thousand-year cycle that was, for Yeats' magical system, the beginning of the modern age. Symbolic Systems; Alienation and the Search for Meaning; Art: Fire is a symbol of purging and renewal, and it is here connected to art both through the poem itself and through the simile of "the gold mosaic of a wall" (18). The idea of art as an instrument of change is central not only to Yeats but to many Modernist poets and writers, who saw the practice of art as a means of reintroducing meaning into what they believed was a period of spiritual crisis. The speaker asks the sages to become his "singing masters" (20). He further asks that they "consume" his heart and show him how to move toward eternity. "Perne" means to turn and refers to the movement of the gyre or historical rhythm of continual change. Yeats' asking of the sages to "perne in a gyre" may be his way of asking them to fulfill their broader function, as dictated by the inevitability of history. Symbolic Systems: The phrase "Consume my heart away" (21) continues the fire symbolism of the poem, and adds the connotation of sacrifice. It is worth noting that many religions use the concept of sacrifice (though not always explicitly) to represent an entrance to a more enlightened state of existence. As the poem progresses, the tone becomes more desperate, expressing an increasing desire to escape the recurrence of birth and death. The teeming physicality of the first stanza has evolved, by the end of the third, into an imagery of mortal suffering: the speaker's heart is "sick" (21) and confined to "a dying animal" (the speaker himself) (22); the speaker's existence is characterized by a lack of self-knowledge ["It knows not what it is" (23)]. The tone of stanza 3 is markedly different from the flat, unemotional tone with which the poem began. Art: The word "artifice" was originally without pejorative connotations, and it roughly meant "skill" or "ingenuity." Yeats seems to use it in this way in the final line of this stanza. But "artifice" also contains the word "art," and thus once again Yeats suggests that artwork might be a means for the creation of a perfect state of being. For another well-known poem addressing this subject, see "Ode to a Grecian Urn" by the English poet John Keats.

6 Stanza 4 In the final stanza the speaker moves toward the idea of eternal life, remarking that "Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any living thing" (25-26). The speaker seems to be imagining that he will achieve the "artifice of eternity" practiced by the sages of the last stanza, and that this will enable him to escape from the boundaries of merely physical existence (hence the phrase "out of nature" and the eschewing of "bodily form"). A sense of transcendent consciousness is implied by the speaker's certainty of tone ("I shall"). The speaker says that, instead of taking bodily form from a living thing, he will be embodied in the kind of jeweled birds Grecian goldsmiths made to entertain emperors. In that form he will "sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come" (30-32). Art; Unity of Being: The symbol of the bird expresses the theme of immortality and a higher, unified consciousness (bird flight is associated with an ascent toward heaven). The image of the bird is enhanced by the word "gold" to emphasize permanence as opposed to the mutability of ordinary life; in this way the bird of the final stanza is different from the "birds in the trees" referred to in the first. Some critics have argued that the symbol of the bird is inappropriate for the expression of Yeats' philosophy: they point out that a bird made by an artisan is still a part of nature and not "out of nature." This observation prompted Yeats to write another poem entitled "Byzantium," which appeared in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). Compare "Byzantium" with "Sailing to Byzantium"; does Yeats effectively "answer" his critics? How do the poems reinforce each other? In what ways are they different? Unity of Being: Note how the poem works as a unified entity; for instance, Yeats judiciously repeats images (birds, singing, gold, etc.) that connect the stanzas, sometimes without the reader consciously realizing it. This interweaving technique reinforces his thematic subject of existential unity. Yeats' poetic style is not prescriptive; throughout, the symbols used present possibilities and complex openings for imaginative exploration. Hence the indeterminacy of the final line, which refers to three options for singing, without insisting on any one of them.

The Second Coming SUMMARY. Characters

The Second Coming SUMMARY. Characters The Second Coming Characters A falconer and his/her falcon The "best" and "worst" among the human population The Sphinx (the image referred to in the second stanza) "Indignant desert birds"; harbingers