[In the following essay, Roppen and Sommer explore the defining themes of “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium,” contending that the poems “work out a myth of spiritual and artistic rebirth.”]

For various reasons, the Romantics and Victorians could best express their spiritual conditions, private and public, through the structure of the journey as an unending quest; or if a goal was hinted, it was left vague enough to accommodate a wide range of symbolic meaning. As faith and myth receded and the traditional patterns of Christian teleology lost their hold on the poetic imagination, the value of the image of life as a journey was sought in the actual process of discovery of the self, or the splendour of action, or the greatness of the past. Combined with the idea of a voluntary exile from a barren present the journey might lead, if not to religious certainty, then at least to freedom and self-realisation, ‘beyond the utmost bound of human thought’, or in the retired ground of the Oxford countryside.

The poets of the twentieth century have achieved an intellectual toughness unknown or rare in their immediate forbears, and with their greater sense of paradoxical action, they have emerged from the perplexities and darkling plains of the Victorians to strike out boldly towards goals of religion and myth which science and doubt seemed to have closed for ever. If we were to single out modern poems which in kind and quality succeed worthily to the ones we have chosen from the nineteenth century, it would have to be Eliot's Journey of the Magi and Yeats's two Byzantium poems. Eliot's treatment of the journey, however, is modern only from the point of view of technique, and it does not include the complex impulses of spiritual and aesthetic search which we found in Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson and Arnold. Yeats's Byzantium poems gather these impulses into a great vision of the destiny of the creative soul.

Taken together, “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium” work out a myth of spiritual and artistic rebirth. This view is not new nor very different from that argued, in one form or another, by most critics. It implies an acceptance of Yeats's mythical system in A Vision and “Anima Mundi” as important to their poetic process and their value. For Yeats's myth, fantastic though it appears, is a product of his poetic imagination and as such helps him, as he shows in poem after poem, to unify his sensibility and integrate his poetic structures, and notably those concerned with transcendence, immortality and rebirth.

In A Vision Yeats has explained his choice of Byzantium as a spiritual goal, and though often quoted, the passage must be recorded here:

I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato. I think I could find in some little wineshop some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even, for the pride of his delicate skill would make what was an instrument of power to Princes and Clerics and a murderous madness in the mob, show as a lovely flexible presence like that of a perfect human body.

I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one, that architect and artificers—though not, it may be, poets, for language had been the instrument of controversy and must have grown abstract—spoke to the multitude and the few alike. The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books, were almost impersonal, almost perhaps without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject-matter and that the vision of a whole people.¹

To Yeats, who hated the disruption of modern life as strongly as Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, Byzantium stood for unity of being, splendour and creative force. In the first poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats's nostalgia for these things feeds on yet another impulse—a need to leave the paradise of the senses, the Ireland of the young:

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.

It has been noted that there is a paradoxical tension in this stanza due to the magnificence which Yeats lavishes on the land he rejects: wistful attachment and regret contend with scorn and keep the stanza subtly balanced for the play of its other intricate relations. The country of the young, as N. Jeffares has shown, is Ireland.² We find the ageing poet in a human situation closely resembling that of the old Ulysses in Tennyson's poem. Yeats marks his sense of alienation in the emphatic syntax: ‘That’ country and ‘Those dying generations’ are already distant in his mind. The initial antithesis of old and young turns into a paradox in the claim that the dying generations are the young not the old men. Its main effect is to shift the emphasis from the physical—that which is transient—to the spiritual, the unageing intellect. And yet it is physical splendour which predominates in the first stanza, and for all his personal scorn Yeats gives the country of the young a grand valediction. Around the centre of human love-making the panorama extends in a careful organisation of detail, each adding to the impression of beauty, strength and abundance. Yeats achieves his finest images here in combinations of nouns and verbs or verbal nouns, suggesting form and action simultaneously, as in ‘salmon-falls’ and ‘mackerel-crowded seas’, where precise denotation enforces the impression of natural energy and proliferation. Further abundance is added in the incantatory ‘Fish, flesh, or fowl’, which, though spoken in contempt, sustains the solemn alliterative music of the stanza. Apart from alliteration there is a strong element of ritual formalism in the groups of triple enumeration (again in ‘Whatever is begotten, born, and dies’).

Another contradictory relation in this stanza inheres in the vast extent and vitality of the natural world set off against the brevity of life. ‘All summer long’ underlines the same paradox through the ironical use of ‘all’ to describe the brief season of summer. The old man's disdain for the natural world and the young is finally focused in the verb caught, suggesting not only nets and snares but also the neo-Platonic captivity of the soul by matter, and the verb completes one metaphorical pattern hinted already in the embrace of the young. The final line further dramatises the antithesis between old and young and defines the old poet's sense of alienation. Cleanth Brooks has noted the self-irony of the image—‘monuments of unageing intellect’, and this irony is part of the paradox of feeling, tone and intention which underlies the whole stanza.

The most important metaphor set up in the first stanza is that of the song—the sensual music. It is linked most closely with the image of the birds, the natural birds in the trees, and we should remember these when we come to the artificial birds singing in the final stanza.³

The second stanza begins with a masterly and unexpected development of the image of old men as monuments:

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.

The transition heightens the irony of the monument-image and at the same time states in a more implacable form the antithesis between the sensual music and that of the soul or intellect, i.e. between body and soul, nature and art. In the context of birds and song the scarecrow image is apt and vivid, and suggests that here already there is a process of metamorphosis at work, part inevitable physical decay, part spiritual and artistic regeneration, with the underlying idea of the latter born of the former through struggle and suffering. The song of soul now counterpoints the sensual music of the first stanza, and the process of learning and of regeneration implies two time-honoured aesthetic principles, i.e. that art is sublimation, and is furthered, like the marksmanship of Philoctetes, by wounds that never heal. Yet in the world of art as in life individual skill must grow by tradition, by the ‘monuments of its own magnificence’, and it is this tradition—in a sense wider than that of song or poetry—which beckons the old poet to Byzantium. Thus, by redefining ‘monuments’ in this new context the ironical yet proudly defiant phrase of the first stanza finds justification and new force. Monuments is an image sufficiently spacious to accommodate the meanings of all the arts.⁴ The emphasis is on the enduring quality of the world of soul and art, and its unity through ‘singing school’ or tradition, in contrast to the transience of the world of nature. The fact that it is the old man not the young who seeks the singing school sustains the paradox of sensual music and the song of the soul. The stanza is wholly concerned with art as a means of spiritual regeneration, and though the situation is painful, it is viewed from great height and with the kind of acceptance which makes even the tragic a source of joy. For the singing of the soul in pain is joyful, because the process of mortal decay is felt as necessary to the new existence it is about to enter.

The actual journey of the poem is limited to the swift yet stately movement of the last lines, but the spiritual quest which is the main theme spans with its rich metaphorical implications the distance between Ireland and Byzantium. To appreciate what this quest means to Yeats, one must bear in mind his idea of that city in A Vision, as a place of ‘incredible splendour’ and unity of existence. In this first poem, however, the quest is defined in terms of rejection and aspiration rather than in the scenery explored, although, once in Byzantium, there are remarkable discoveries indeed:

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.

A new phase begins in the poetic metamorphosis. Through the image of soul in the preceding stanza, we are prepared for the religious function of song in this process, and for the solemn ritual invocation with its repetitive stresses on holy fire. It is significant that Yeats invokes ‘sages’ to be his singing-masters—men who have gone through all the phases of experience and reached what Yeats in his ‘system’ called the ‘condition of fire’. From this high position they are called upon to ‘perne in a gyre’ or redescend through the cycles of experience (like a spindle winding thread) to perform the ritual of purgation.⁵ The strange image is effective here more because of its ring of magic and incantation than because of its relation to Yeats's system of the gyres or cycles of history which man, the microcosm, shares with the macrocosm.

As invocation turns to prayer, the religious fervour reaches a climax in the phrase ‘Consume my heart away’. The metamorphosis from scarecrow to a soul singing triumphantly from the deep source of its pain is here all but completed in a sacrificial act, in which the religious and poetic forces coincide or become identical. In this ritual of purgation, the dualistic awareness of the first and second stanzas is gathered to new intensity in the image of the dying animal from which the poet desires his soul to be freed.

The ‘artifice of eternity’ to which the old poet aspired must be reached through purgatorial fire. Apart from the traditional cultic significance of the fire symbol, Yeats intended it, as Cleanth Brooks has shown, to draw meaning from his metaphysics in “Anima Mundi”:

There are two realities, the terrestrial and the condition of fire. All power is from the terrestrial condition, for there all opposites meet and there only is the extreme of choice possible, full freedom. And there the heterogeneous is, and evil, for evil is the strain one upon another of opposites; but in the condition of fire is all music and all rest.⁶

In this condition the soul ‘puts on the rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body and contemplates all the events of its memory and every possible impulse in an eternal possession of itself in one single moment.’ This idea of metamorphosis (or metempsychosis) as a kind of rebirth into a new existence is central to Yeats's system. ‘Human life’, he states in the ‘fifth proposition’ in A Vision, ‘is either the struggle of a destiny against all other destinies, or a transformation of the character defined in the horoscope into timeless and spaceless existence.’

Cleanth Brooks has indicated the relevance of the fire symbol to another passage in “Anima Mundi”. From the Great Memory, the Anima Mundi, Yeats believed, two kinds of influences or inflowings came to man; first the natural inflowing, shared by man and animal alike, and then the second, ‘which is not natural but intellectual … is from the fire.’

It is a ‘luminous body’, born from the fire, which Yeats's soul seeks in Byzantium, as his ‘artifice of eternity’, an eternity which is ‘all music and all rest’:

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.

The consummation through fire is both a liberation and a creative act, like that of the artist. Thus the dualism sustained from the first stanza is here finally resolved in the triumph of the spirit and of art over nature, the sensual music, as the poet achieves his ‘Mask’ or artifice in the golden bird. Of course, pedantically speaking, the bodily form of the bird is taken from nature, yet Sturge Moore's criticism of this point cannot be seriously considered, and Yeats would hardly have written the second Byzantium poem mainly to mend the flaw.⁷ ‘Bodily form’ means kind rather than shape, and the golden bird of the final stanza is certainly as far removed from ‘those dying generations’ of the first stanza as Yeats could wish. The important thing for Yeats was to find a symbol which would contrast with the natural birds—the sensual music—and yet sustain the structure of song and effect its transformation from nature into art, from body into spirit. Though the emphasis appears to be on art in this process, both the process and its outcome, the artifact, would be meaningless except as a myth hinting through symbols and images the destiny of the poet's soul. That the creative forces of art should be active and predominant in this destiny is what we might expect, since the poet's soul is here exploring, and sharing in, a world where all life is one, and where the soul manifests itself completely through works of art, in this ‘holy city’.

As Jeffares has shown, there were legends of artificial birds and trees which helped Yeats to choose the form of his ‘artifice’.⁸ Yeats himself has a vague reference to such legends. But apart from these sources, there is surely something like a Phoenix myth embedded in the whole symbolic structure. More important, however, than the individual symbols is the total symbolic context as it emerges through the linking and interaction of the images of the bird and the golden bough. While the individual images tend to stress the element of art in this metamorphosis, they together bring into focus the basic idea, that of spiritual rebirth.

It would appear that the idea of eternity which is conveyed in the bird-symbol gains depth and precision if we recognise the ‘golden bough’ in both Byzantium poems as the mythical Golden Bough which Frazer explored in his famous ‘Study in Magic and Religion.’ Yeats was, of course, familiar with this work, and in 1926, when he wrote “Sailing to Byzantium,” he also found in Frazer's study the idea for the first stanza of Two Songs from a Play.⁹

The myth of the Golden Bough is best known from Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI, where Aeneas is able to descend into Hades and return to earth, having planted the bough on the ‘threshold’ of the entrance to Hades, as a gift to Proserpine. In myth and ritual, according to Maud Bodkin, the bough has represented the ‘power of renewal in vegetation and in other forms of life’, and in The Aeneid it functions as a ‘symbol of the transition from death to life.’¹⁰ It is this meaning which Yeats has exploited so directly and yet unobtrusively in both the Byzantium poems. Drawing on the wealth of mythical and ritual association which the bough provides, Yeats was able to link his image of the golden bird, the perfect and enduring artifact, with the ancient symbol of rebirth into a new mode of existence. The component parts of the bird-bough image thus interact to lend a richer and more definite meaning to the process of regeneration, as an act of spiritual rebirth.

That Yeats had this complex significance in mind when he came to write the second “Byzantium” may be seen from his use of the bird symbol in the third stanza, where the bird—‘Planted on the star-lit golden bough, / Can like the cocks of Hades crow.’ According to Richard Ellmann, ‘Yeats had learned from Eugenie Strong's Apotheosis and After Life that the cock, as herald of the sun, became ‘by an easy transition the herald of rebirth’ on Roman tombstones.’¹¹

The golden bough thus stands as a threshold symbol—a passport to that purer and more perfect state of being into which the poet's soul will be born, and it enforces the rebirth idea which Yeats focused in the bird itself. He chose this form not as an eccentricity, but for this traditional symbolic meaning, and because he needed an image to complete the main antithesis of the poem and one which at the same time would sustain the structural metaphor of song, or poetry. It is the ritual of a poet's death and rebirth we are attending, and we might expect that in the intricacies of Yeats's symbolism the ways of his art and his soul would coincide, so that what is in reality and above all an immortality myth appears to be rather a dream of the artist to survive through his artifact. But this superficial and facile kind of immortality was not Yeats's concern in these poems.

It has been suggested that the poem ends where it began, for ‘what is past, or passing, or to come’ is really the same thing as ‘those dying generations’.¹² Yet the range of time and experience suggested as topic for the song concerns something more universal and less sensual than the world of the young and their brief summer. Rather it means that the poet, having assumed the ‘luminous body’ of the bird, will contemplate ‘all the events of its memory and every possible impulse in an eternal possession of itself in one single moment.’ In these words, as in the poem itself, it is the artist's yearning to conquer time and space which speaks.

Yeats's exile from the world of nature is prompted, in part at least, by his urgent desire for impersonal modes of being and creating, for transcending his human personality.¹³ Thus, though finally he appears to return to the world of sensual music and of change, he is in fact performing a ritual in which he divests himself of his personal limitations—the dying animal—in order to become that ‘monument of unageing intellect’ which can be only imperfectly realised in his mortal state. The main development in the symbolic structure concerns the transformation of the old poet from neglected mortal scarecrow into the glorious imperishable bird, eloquent of wisdom and triumphant over time and mutability.

Needless to say, Yeats intended his esoteric symbols of bird and bough merely to indicate the nature of the spiritual rebirth to which he aspired. On a literal level the images make no sense, not even if we interpret the total symbolic structure as representing simply the poetry which the poet leaves as immortal works of art to posterity. Yet though art and its processes are most important in the rebirth which the poem celebrates, it is only a means pointing to that ultimate condition of the soul, where all is ‘music and all rest’.

Despite their graphic precision, then, the images in “Sailing to Byzantium” suggest a wide field of undefined symbolic meaning, and Yeats must have felt on concluding the poem that there was still a great deal of gold which had not been hammered out. This undeveloped richness in theme and imagery, rather than the pedantic criticism of Sturge Moore must have been the source that engendered the second “Byzantium,” which is an elaboration of the first, more than a sequel.

From the point of view of the journey, “Sailing to Byzantium” is remarkable for the steep antithesis between its two geographical centres, and for the richness of metaphorical meaning which the voyage between them conveys, as death and rebirth on the one hand, and as conquest of the realms of art on the other. The two final stanzas involve things seen or explored, but apart from the mosaic there is little which represents a discovery with metaphorical implications. In “Byzantium,” on the other hand, the oriental city which Yeats chose as his spiritual destination lends more concrete detail to his rebirth myth:

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

The antithesis between nature and art in “Sailing to Byzantium” remains, and, as we shall see, there is a parallel development in the symbolic structure. Yet here instead of a rich naturalistic scenery we have, from the beginning, images: the city is explored with the artist's awareness, and hence the ground is prepared for a more subtle and intricate symbolism. The direction and movement of the poem corresponds to that in the first one, for the ‘unpurged images’ here are like the ‘dying generations’ of Ireland. And there is also ‘sensual music’, of a crude kind, with soldiery and revellers singing in the darkened streets. These belong, however, to the day-time world, the world of nature, which is represented as more coarse and less bitterly regretted than the land of the young in the former poem. In the middle of the stanza, amid the noises of soldiery and night-walkers, falls the heavy sound of the cathedral gong, and with this turn the world of art and religion begins to gain ascendancy over the world of nature. The antithesis between these worlds is dramatised in the following lines through the image of the dome, towering over ‘the fury and the mire of human veins.’

As Cleanth Brooks has shown with reference to Yeats's system, a starlit dome belongs to phase one, the dark of the moon, and a moonlit dome to phase fifteen, or the full moon. These phases represent complete objectivity and subjectivity, and in these phases man cannot exist, since human nature is a mixture of both. Hence the starlit or moonlit dome, existing in a state of purity and perfection, disdains man, the creature of ‘mere complexities’. Again, in the images of ‘fury and mire’ Yeats gives us a picture of the sensuality and paltriness of the human animal more scornful than in the first poem. In contrast to it, the dome, though built by human hands, has gone through a process of purification and reached the state of the superhuman. For the sake of poetic logic, one must assume that now in the starlit or moonlit night, at the historical moment which Yeats has chosen according to his system, the purity of phases one and fifteen reigns over the city, and the moment would seem to correspond to the discovery of the sages in ‘God's holy fire’. Since the human beings and their sensual music now recede (and there is ritual emphasis on the verb), this change means death to the human animal, the body, and the world of nature. In the next stanza we are in a dim borderland between the two worlds, and the old poet, dying, pursues his quest amid images now of a different kind:

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

The tentative shifts of the syntax hint at the dissolution of the day-time world, and the mystery and uncertainty of the world into which the poet is being led by his images. The fleeting nature of these images also suggests the state of artistic creation or composition, so that all the time the processes of spiritual metamorphosis and those of creative art are related, as in “Sailing to Byzantium,” but now with more detailed points of reference. As for the mystery of ‘man or shade’, Cleanth Brooks has discovered a passage in “Hodos Camelionis” which throws light on it. Yeats is here meditating on the Great Memory:

Is there nation-wide multiform reverie, every mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and reacting upon one another no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the lips? A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he cast.’¹⁴

The shades or images, then, are both spiritual manifestations, and here they seem to emerge as they emerge in dreams or in artistic perceptions. As for the manner in which Yeats thought of the soul as being able to manifest itself, T. R. Henn quotes an interesting passage from Yeats's essay on Swedenborg:¹⁵

It may be that More but copies Philoponus who thought the shade's habitual form, the image that it was as it were frozen in for a time, could be again ‘coloured and shaped by fantasy’, and that ‘it is probable that when the soul desires to manifest it shapes itself, setting its own imagination in movement, or even that it is probable with the help of daemonic co-operation that it appears and again becomes visible, becoming condensed and rarefied.

The relation here between spiritual manifestation and the working of the imagination seems to be the idea which Yeats has exploited in this obscure second stanza.

‘Hades' bobbin’, as commentators have noted, is an image, drawn from Yeats's system, of the soul unwinding after death the experience it has wound up during life. The image, which is deliberately non-sentimental and crude, alludes to Yeats's idea that all existence is a series of cycles or gyres winding and unwinding experience (as on a spindle or perne).¹⁶ The symbolic situation corresponds to that of the prayer to the sages in “Sailing to Byzantium,” to ‘perne in a gyre’ to the poet and gather him into eternity. Here a soul manifesting itself as shade or rather as image, having ‘no moisture and no breath’, is returning along the ‘winding path’ of experience to summon the dying or dead poet, and to guide him. And being thus initiated into the other world, the poet hails this image as part of the true reality, the superhuman, and his invocation—‘I call it death-in-life and life-in-death’, like his prayer to the sages in ‘God's holy fire’ aims at transcending his human and earthly limitations, in order to reach the ‘artifice of eternity’. The spiritual or superhuman is the power which bridges the two worlds, and through this power the old explorer passes on to contemplate the eternal form, the Mask, which he aspires to in the world of the superhuman:

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the star-lit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire and blood.

The device of syntactical indecision is repeated, again to stress the mystery of this vision, for which no earthly or natural categories can serve. At the same time, the repetition of the words miracle, bird, golden handiwork lends ritual and incantational magic to the lines. Unlike the ‘thing’ made by Grecian goldsmiths, this bird defies definition in words, and the emphasis on its miraculous nature reminds us that it is the product of the inscrutable processes of art as well as of the supernatural.

With the image of the bird the other symbol of rebirth from “Sailing to Byzantium,” the golden bough, appears, and through the interaction of these the symbolic structure of rebirth in the former poem emerges once more. Amid the star-lit splendour and purity of this world of spirit and art, the golden bough which supports the bird stands on the threshold to admit the poet into eternity. To emphasise this transition as a rebirth Yeats relates the golden bird to the cocks of Hades, the traditional symbol of rebirth on Roman tombstones. We should also bear in mind that Yeats in his system used the phrase ‘bird born out of the fire’ to describe the supernatural, and the word ‘born’ indicates that the symbol of the bird was consciously associated with the idea of rebirth and hence came to predominate in his pilgrimage to Byzantium.

The difficulties of this stanza are partly due to the syntactical turn in ‘Or, by the moon embittered’, and partly to the obscurity of this image itself. The bird may either sing of a new existence beyond nature and death, or it may scorn the world of nature, like that other work of art, the dome. In the latter case, the antithesis, and even antagonism, between these worlds is made more fierce than in “Sailing to Byzantium.” Hence we may accept T. R. Henn's suggestion that the bird is embittered by the moon because the moon is the principle of change in nature, the feminine principle.¹⁷ By linking the bird and the dome in a common scorn of ‘the fury and mire of human veins’, Yeats insists on his idea of Byzantium as a place where purity and permanence are achieved.

The rest of the poem performs a ritual of purgation corresponding to that in the third stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium,” though here as elsewhere in the poem the symbolic texture is more intricate. The holy fire burns again in the mosaic:

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

The flames are once more the ‘holy fire’, begotten of flames in the workshops and, as works of art, remain beyond the powers of nature. Though these flames in their turn have no power over physical nature, they have the power to purify the spirit, from its ‘dying animal’, the body, and its fury and mire. In this borderland between nature and art, life and eternity, these mosaic flames represent the ‘condition of fire’ for which they purge the soul. In their ritual dance of death the spirits partake of the movement of these flames, and the ‘agony of trance’ which they experience suggests both sacrificial fervour and the artist's creative intensity.¹⁸ Thus the aspects of spiritual rebirth and artistic creation continue to interact in this metamorphosis, and one might say that in this stanza they are fused in a ‘mutual flame’.

The fifth stanza completes the journey from nature to art, life to eternity, and here the legend of Arion and the dolphin is exploited to sustain the symbolic structure of the song:

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

There is a frantic tension between opposites in this stanza, which may be viewed as the final agonising struggle between nature and art, body and soul, which began in the first stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium.” While the world of art and its forces prevail, it is still superimposed upon the images of the world of nature, from which its own images are made and hammered into perfection. There is a kind of double vision in which we observe not only the flames and dolphins in the Emperor's pavement, but at the same time the sea of sensual music—‘that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea’ of nature. Thus, in one intense focus, Yeats holds together the two extremes of his spiritual journey, and he achieves a singular concentration in this stanza by crowding together the central images and ideas of the two poems. Paradoxically, though “Byzantium” explores the mystery of spiritual rebirth and artistic creation which “Sailing to Byzantium” only hinted at, the conclusion here is less serene, and though here too we have an ultimate triumph of art and a celebration of the metamorphosis from creature to artifact, body to soul, it is the vision of nature, particularly in the first and final lines, which is most powerfully rendered. In the sombre grandeur of the final line, Yeats focuses once more the antithesis between nature and art (dolphin, gong) and the painful struggle from which the new spiritual being, as well as the work of art, are born. Those ‘images’, it would appear, refer to the ‘bitter furies of complexity’ (and the ‘unpurged images of day’) which give birth to, or are transformed into, the image of art.

The second “Byzantium,” then, is more concerned with the mystery of the two-fold metamorphosis than with the ultimate goal, the ‘artifice of eternity’. While the poem therefore throws fascinating light on this process, as Yeats sees it, it does not clarify the symbol of the artifice itself, except for the greater elaboration of the underlying idea of rebirth. As his contemporary and later poems show, Yeats was too deeply immersed in the ‘dolphin-torn’ and ‘gong-tormented sea’ of life to pursue further his quest for the ultimate, the ‘artifice of eternity’. Yet in the city of Byzantium as he imagined it he found an amazing richness of symbols and images through which he was able to unify, above the central antithesis, the worlds of nature and art, in the idea of a creative process in which the spirit is reborn through the operation of forces which also engender the enduring work of art. A unified vision of existence, and life abundant through the metamorphoses of art and spirit, was the goal which Yeats reached in his pilgrimage to Byzantium. Rarely has a symbol enabled a poet so to integrate his sensibility and fuse the energies of religious, intellectual and artistic aspiration.

Notes

1. A Vision, Macmillan Paperbacks Edition, 1961, pp. 279-280.

2. ‘The Byzantine Poems of W. B. Yeats’, The Review of English Studies, vol. 22, 1946.

3. The careful arrangement for the purpose of contrast is due to Yeats's radical revision of the first stanzas in order to bring them into line with the two final ones. See N. Jeffares, op. cit. pp. 44-46.

4. A different view of the aptness of this image is taken by A. Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit, p. 33, and by A. Mizener, ‘The Romanticism of W. B. Yeats.’ The Southern Review, 1942, p. 616.

5. For a thorough discussion of the gyre and perne images see T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower, pp. 182 ff. and 214.

6. Quoted from Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, 1939, p. 191.

7. Cf. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, pp. 87-88, who attributes some importance to Moore's objection, though he rightly calls it a ‘quibble’.

8. N. Jeffares, op. cit.

9. Cf. Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, p. 260. Since this chapter was written, my attention has been drawn to a similar view of the Golden Bough in Yeats's poem outlined by G. S. Fraser in an article, ‘Yeats's Byzantium’, The Critical Quarterly, 1960.

10. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, pp. 130, 135.

11. Op. cit., p. 220.

12. ‘The whole poetic effect, the purgation which will gather him “out of nature” into “the artifice of eternity”, is made solely that he may celebrate better the world of love and creation and fecundity he has left behind.’ A. Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit, p. 34.

13. Cf. Peter Ure, Towards a Mythology.

14. The Trembling of the Veil. 1922, p. 144. Cf. also T. R. Henn's comment: ‘Shade, then appears to be incorporeal spirit, but with certain properties of communication. Image would seem to be the shade in a more or less materialized condition.’ Op. cit. p. 219.

15. Mediums and the Desolate Places, by W. B. Yeats, in Lady Gregory: Visions and Beliefs, vol. ii, p. 330.

16. For various useful comments on ‘Hades’ bobbin’ see Cleanth Brooks, op. cit. p. 196; A. N. Jeffares, op. cit. p. 50; T. R. Henn, op. cit. p. 219, and R. Ellmann, op. cit. p. 220.

17. Op. cit. pp. 166, 220.

18. Cleanth Brooks has an enlightening gloss on the phrase ‘flames begotten of flames’; this, he suggests, ‘requires reference to Yeats's statement that ‘the spirits do not get from it [the vehicle] the material from which their forms are made, but their forms take light from it as one candle takes light from another.’ ‘Anima Mundi’, Brooks, op. cit. p. 179.