W. B. Yeats
envisions a paradise of intellectual everlastings and underlying youth in
the symbol of Byzantium.
W.B. Yeats, like John Keats, views art
superior to life.To him spiritual life is true life and the world of art
contrasts the mundane world. The spirit is immortal and art too is regarded by
Yeats as timeless and eternal. This view of art and life was developed by Yeats
in his two Byzantium
poems namely The Sailing to Byzantium and Byzantium.
The first poem is a picture of a voyage from the material world to the holy
city of eternity. The second is a vision of the city from the inside where the
soul is depicted first as a walking mummy and then as the emperor’s golden bird
“whose glory of changeless metal” is contrasted with the “complexities of mire
and blood.” In the second poem, Byzantium
is a place of cleansing flames.
Byzantium, now called
Constantinpole or Istambul, was the capital of Eastern wing of the Holy Roman Empire. It was noted for is art, specially
mosaic work, and gold enam welling. However, in the poem, it is no real city
but a country of the niwol outside time and Nature, a utopia, a retreat from
the process of ageing and decaying. It is a symbol, “of the world of intellect
and the spirit.”
The first poem in the Byzantium series is The Sailing to Byzantium.
It is a highly symbolic poem. Byzantium
represents the world of intellect, spirit and art. An old man cannot be happy
or at peace in the world of the senses. He should therefore withdraw to an
ideal world where he can be happy in the midst of “monuments of unageing
intellect” and where his soul will be transformed into a golden bird singing
upon a golden bough to the lords and ladies of Byzantium. On that golden bough the old man
will himself become one of those monuments which he has so admired.
The poet realizes that an old man is a contemptible
figure, a mere “taterred coat upon stick,” unless he devotes himself to the study
and enjoyment of art. The older he grows, the greater should be his devotion to
art. Appreciation and understanding of art can be achieved only by studying
magnificent and immortal works of art. Since Byzantium is the traditional home of art, the
poet has decided to devote himself to the study of its rich treasures.
Therefore, the poet sails for Byzantium and as soon as
he reaches there, he prays, not to God, but to God’s saints to come down from
heaven and teach him the appreciation of art. The sages are great artists of Byzantium who created in
the pas “monuments of unageing intellect,”. He visualizes them standing in
God’s “holy fire,” like figures in mosaic work, standing against a background
of pure gold. The fire is a symbol of purification, and it does them no harm
for they are supernatural. The poet invokes them to come down with a rapid
spiral-movement and to teach him how to enjoy the beauty of art.
Sailing to Byzatium reflects the poet’s
interest in Byzantine art and
culture. Byzantium
in this poem becomes a symbol of a perfect world. Rejecting this world of
birth, reproduction, and death, Yeats makes up his mind to sail to Byzantium where he
thinks, he can defeat Time because he will go to the world of art and because
art is timeless. Thus sailing to Byzantium
meant for him making a voyage to a world vastly different from this world of
materialistic and sensual interests. To
sail to Byzantium
means to enter the realm of art. This realm, apart from giving him pleasure, is
eternal.
Another poem in this series is Byzantium. It was written
as a sequel to Sailing to Byzantium
after an interval of three years. Yeats said that he wrote the second poem in
order to throw light on the first one and make it explicable. But in the poem Byzantium is no reality,
but “a country of the mind,” transcendental place outside time and space. It is
beyond the world.
As in the earlier poem, the first stanza of
Byzantium is concerned with the flesh-and-blood world that is being left
behind, the world of “unpurged images” .After that opening stanza, the
miraculous golden bird, the purgatorial flames, even the spirits crossing the
sea, are all recalled, but in reverse order to their appearance in the earlier
poem, for both the setting and the point of view have here changed completely.
“Sailing to Byzantium”
represents the voyage and is written from the point of view of the uninitiated
outsider who leaves the material world for the immaterial. Byzantium,
on the other hand, is written from the point of view of the initiated
individual who watches the uninitiated, unpurged spirits arriving from beyond
the “gong-tormented sea” which separates Byzantium’s
reality from the flesh and blood reality of the twentieth century world.
Byzantium is for Yeats, so
to speak, the heaven of man’s mind; there the mind or soul dwells in eternal or
miraculous for; there all things are possible because all things are known to
the soul. Byzantium
had both a historical and an ideal form, and the historical is the exemplar,
the dramatic witness, of the ideal. Byzantium
represents both a dated epoch and a recurrent state of insight, when Nature is
magical, that is, at the back of mind, and magic is natural- a practical rather
than a theoretic art.
Thus, the Byzantium
poems give a picture of the transcendent world of art, which timeless and
eternal. These two poems may also be regarded as incorporating a, neo-Platonic
vision of life after death. But they also celebrate the work of art as opposed
to the work of nature. However they both deal with the last things. The
Yeatsian aesthetic resolves into a final metaphor that reconciles all
metaphors: “I hail the super-human;/ I call it death-in –life and
life-in-death.” In this way, the dialogue of self and soul, and of art and
life, both reach a conclusion.
