Volume III, Issue IV, June 2015 – ISSN 2321-7065
THOUGHTS ON ETERNITY VERSES MORTALITY IN
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM: A ROMANTIC POEM
BY W. B. YEATS.
Prashant Mahajan
Department of P.G. Studies and Reacerch in English
R. D. V. V. Jabalpur (M. P.)
Pragyaa Gupta
Department of P.G. Studies and Reacerch in English
R.D.V.V. Jabalpur (M. P.)
India
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) epitomizes the history of English poetry in his life time.
He began his career under the influence of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Spenser, Rossetti and
the Aesthetic Movement of the late nineteenth century. Yeats is well known as a modern
poet, representing twentieth century poetry, but his work is replete with many romantic
elements. “Sailing to Byzantium” is a perfect example of this. “Sailing to Byzantium” was
published in 1920, when European society was slowly attempting to recover from the
devastating psychological impact of the First World War. It explores the spiritual aspirations
of an individual. The poet, in the spiritual chaos of the post-First World War situation,
believes that the immortal life can be discovered only by an escape from the physical
materiality of the world, of the flesh as symbolized by contemporary Ireland, to the centre of
Eastern Christendom, Byzantium. This is a universal theme in Western literature that
acquired a special poignancy in the poetry of the Romantic period and in the Odes of John
Keats in particular: the transience of human life, contrasted with the immortality of the spirit
as revealed in art. The Shakespearean sonnets, too are full of this romantic yearning for an
immortality that can be found only in art, in a sense, than this spiritual quest though it recurs
in classical Western literature, is characteristically Romantic, it is found both in Renaissance
and in the era of the Romantic Revival.
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“Sailing to Byzantium” represents a picture of a voyage from the material world to the holy
city of eternity. So, the poem is about a spiritual quest. The poet wishes to go towards
Byzantium, which is a symbol of the world of art and culture and also of spirituality.
Byzantium is:
Historically a holy city of Eastern Christendom, he makes it a secular city of the poetic
imagination…He rebuilds the city to suit his own ideals, and chooses to find his own art
reflected in its conventionalized designs and symbols. It is not Byzantium but a new
Byzantium. (149)
Here Byzantium is a Paradise, a place of cleansing flames. Two of the most impressive
symbols in this poem are, first “Byzantium” the holy city, a timeless Paradise, and second the
image of the poet as a dynamic old man for whom old age is not decrepitude but a spiritual
adventure.
According to Elder Olson in “Sailing to Byzantium” an old man faces the problem of old age,
of death, and of regeneration. Yeats view about the old age is that, it is an age of spiritual
experience, which excludes a man from the sensual joys of youth. For him the world appears
to belong completely to the young, it is no place for the old, indeed, an old man is scarcely a
man at all - he is an empty artifice, an effigy merely, of a man, he is a tattered coat upon a
stick. So he must not think of the flesh but rather of the soul. The young, rapt in their
sensuality are ignorant utterly of the world of the spirit. Hence if old age frees a man from
sensual passion, he may rejoice in the liberation of the soul. But the soul can best earn its own
greatness from the great works of art, hence he turns to those great works, but in turning to
them, he finds that these are by no means mere effigies, or monuments, but things which have
souls also, these live in the noblest element of God's fire, free from all corruption, hence he
prays for death, for release from his mortal body, and since the monuments exhibit the
possibility of the souls‟ existence in some other matter than flesh, he wishes reincarnation,
not now in a mortal body, but in the immortal and changeless embodiment of art. (Olson
260).
In “Sailing to Byzantium” there is thus a contrast between the two modes of life, the
everyday physical life and spiritual life. Ireland is the city which represents the world of
young people they are found enjoying in “one another‟s arms”. Sensual pleasure is found
everywhere in this country. Youth is like summer which is very temporary, no matter how
beautiful it is. The older generation represents the spiritual world, which is eternal or
immortal:
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another‟s arm birds in the trees
Those dying generation - at their songs,
The salmon - falls, the mackerel crowded seas, II (1-4).
Ireland/youth is compared to the Garden of Eden from which expulsion is certain, while the
city of Byzantium becomes the Augustinian Christianity of God, which is eternal. The
comparison of youth with summer is a traditional one, but the image of the bird as a symbol
for the immortal life of art is typically Romantic, as seen in, for example, Shelley's “To a
Skylark” and Keats “Odd to a Nightingale”. But Yeats reverses the usual Romantic flight
from the city to the countryside and sees the city, represents the immortality of art. In
William Wordsworth‟s “Tintern Abbey” the poet, wants to escape from the physical and
material world. Longing to escape from this real and materialistic world is an important
motive in Romantic poetry. Wordsworth retreats himself from the sensual world. He finds
peace in the lap of the nature. In the poem, “Tintern Abbey” he suggest his sister, to trust the
nature only. Nature will never betray the person who will go in its shade:
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart
How of, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee (II 53-56).
In the last stanza of the poem (Sailing to Byzantium) the poet likes to take the shape of a
golden bird, which Grecian goldsmiths are believed to have designed for the pleasure of an
emperor. As a work of art, he would be beyond decay and death, unlike the natural bird in the
first stanza. The artificial bird will be placed on a golden bough and it will sing songs of all
times, “Of what is past, or passing, or to come." (1-32). The poet‟s song, when he becomes a
golden bird will be a timeless one, of spiritual ecstasy.
In the first stanza of this poem therefore, a mortal bird of nature, sings a song of
sensual joy in praise of mortal things of “whatever is begotten, born and dies"(l-6). In stanza
IV an immortal and artificial bird set in an artificial tree sings an eternal song of spiritual joy,
in praise of eternal things, of “What is past, or passing or to come” (l-32). The same thematic
idea is continued by Yeats, which is found in Shakespearean sonnets, “Shall I Compare thee
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to a Summer's Day”, “Not Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments” and in “Since Brass, Nor
stone, Nor Earth, Nor Boundless, Sea”. In Keats‟ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a
Nightingale” the theme of immortality is profoundly present. In “Ode to a Nightingale” the
nightingale is a living bird, it represents mortality. But soon after the poet's reverie is over,
the sweet song of the Nightingale crosses all the boundaries of time, and becomes an example
of immortality or eternity. Keats takes the bird as a symbol of immortality through its song.
The poet addresses the Nightingale as “light winged Dryad of the trees". In the poem “Ode to
a Nightingale” nightingale is a spirit. He desires to escape the world of harsh reality and he
thinks of entering in the world of the nightingale through wine, which by offering only
immediate intoxication is unsatisfactory (Stanza 3,4), to his imagination:
Fade far away dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known.
The weariness, the fever: and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leader-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow (21-30).
But then he realizes that it is only through his poetic imagination
he can escape from this
materialistic world. The poet discards all worldly pleasures and takes the help of his poetic
imagination to escape to ideal world; symbolized by the Nightingale but he realizes that this
escape cannot be a permanent one. Yeats too, has often written about this Romantic longing
to escape the harshness. He cares the tragedies of the world. For example in Yeats‟ “The
Stolen Child” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, the idea becomes prominent.
In “Sailing to Byzantium” also, the poet wishes to go to another place which will give him a
different kind of pleasure. He thinks that the worldly life of young people is no longer
suitable for him, for he is now a tattered coat upon a stick (l- l 0) just as in Keats‟s “Ode to a
Nightingale” the old men:
... sit and hear each other groan;
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Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs (22-23).
That is why both the poets decide to move towards the world of art, which leads to the
immortal world of the spirit. After the death of the mortal body, he (Yeats) does not want to
become a living organism. He wishes to become a work of art, like Keats's bird which is not
the actual physical bird but the symbol of immortality, like the urn in Keats's “Ode on a
Grecian Urn”:
Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird
No hungry generations tread thee down,
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown (70- 74).
At the beginning of the poem “Sailing to Byzantium”, the real or mortal bird sings a song for
sensual pleasure but at the end of the poem the bird is transformed into a work of art. The
work of art is lifeless or artificial, made up of gold, but it will sing the song of immortality. In
the “Ode to a Nightingale” a mortal birds‟ song becomes immortal, through the unearthly
pleasure it communicates.
Similarly in Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Um,” the urn is a product of ancient Greek art. On the
border of the urn, are depicted numerous life-like figures of living reality, like young men
and maids making love, beautiful fields, forests, mountains and valleys, a youth piping under
a tree and a priest leading an animal to the alter for a sacrifice. In this work of art a particular
moment is captured and the lifeless creature becomes immortal through the work of art:
The dead world of ancient Greece, as immortalized on
an Urn surviving from that period, is the vessel of this
deadly - deathless ambiguity (Burke ll5).
Thus in both „Yeats's poem and Keats‟s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the world of art, which is
lifeless itself, represents a world beyond life, a world that is immortal Byzantium and the
world which is curved on the urn becomes the symbol of a perfect world:
He seeks the very quality that Plato and Plotinus miss. This,
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I take it is the theme of “Sailing to Byzantium‟; (Keats‟s „Ode
on a Grecian Urn‟). Because he is old he must withdraw
from nature... It is now the turn of soul: but in this poem soul
has a new function not to climb the winding stair, but to sing.
Its function now is to celebrate the self. The figures on
Keats's Grecian Urn were likewise frozen in a moment of
Change, and remain as permanent symbols of the most transient
thing we know, youthful love (Lerner 07).
In the three poems the “Golden Bird”, “Grecian Urn” and the “Song of Nightingale”
represent the same idea of immortality. They convey the idea of transience of time, through
the works of art. According to both the poets, only art can give the solace and happiness of
the spiritual life. As Kenneth Burke comments: Yeats‟ vision of immortality in his Byzantium
poems but carries one step farther the Keatsian identification with the “Grecian Urn”:
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing
But such a form as Grecian goldsmith make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling... (Burke118)
The transience of all earthly and living things is contrasted with the permanence that art
confers on them. According to C. M. Bowra in The Romantic Imagination, the paradox of all
art is that it gives permanence to fleeting moments and fixes them in an unchanging form.
The work of art has its own life, which is more vivid than the actual life on which Keats
touches in the third stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. The paradox of the urn, as of all true
works of art is that it transients time by making a single moment last forever and so become
timeless. The contrast between mortality and the immortality of art that is the major theme of
“Sailing to Byzantium” links it to the major themes and motives of Romantic Poetry.
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Works Cited
Bowra, C.M. “Symbols and Rituals in Later Poetry”, The Identity of Yeats. Richard Ellamann
,Oxford University Press: New York 1964.
Burke Kenneth. “Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats”, Keats: Odes. Ed. G.S. Fraser. Case
Book Series, The Macmillan Press Ltd., Hongkong, 1971.
Keats John. “Ode to a Nightingale”, The Poetical Works of John Keats. Ed. H.W. Garrad,
Oxford: At the Clarendon Press 1958, Oxford University Press 1958, 1938.
Lerner Laurence. “Yeats‟s Poetic World”, Critics on Yeats. Ed. Raymond Cowell; London
George Allen Ltd., Great Britain 1971.
Wordsworth William. “Poems of the Imagination: Lines Composed a Few Miles Above
Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13,1798”,
Wordsworth Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson, A New Edition, revised by Ernest De
Selincourt Oxford University Press 1904.
Yeats W.B. “Sailing to Byzantium”, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London Macmillan
& Co. Ltd., Great Britain 1965.
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