The Yeats Journal of Korea/한국 예이츠 저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2014.45.

117
Vol. 45 (2014): 117-129

Yeats’s Attachment to the Reality in

“Sailing to Byzantium”
Hie Sup Choi

____________________________________

Abstract: W. B. Yeats’s “Byzantium” and “Sailing to Byzantium” are known as

Byzantium poems. In these poems Yeats shows Byzantium as an ideal place in
which to live an eternal life. So, scholars examine these poems to see Yeats seeking
an ideal place. I focus on “Sailing to Byzantium” to prove that Yeats has affirmed
reality, while he is striving to achieve the ideal.
Key words: Yeats, Byzantium, “Sailing to Byzantium,” reality, ideal
Author: Hie Sup Choi is Professor of English, Humanities College, Jeonju University.
He is now Advisor of the Korean Society of East-West Comparative
Literature, Advisor of the Korean Association of Translation Studies, and
Vice-President of the Yeats Society of Korea.
E-mail: choihiesup@hanmail.net
____________________________________

제목: 비잔티움으로의 항해 에 나타난 예이츠의 현실에의 집착

우리말 요약: 예이츠의 비잔티움 과 비잔티움으로의 항해 는 흔히 비잔티움 시편으
로 알려져 있다. 이 두 편에서 예이츠는 비잔티움을 이상향으로 상정하고 여기에서 생
활하는 것을 이상으로 생각하고 있음을 보여준다. 이러한 이유로 이 작품은 예이츠가
이상향을 추구하는 작품으로 연구되는데, 본고에서는 비잔티움으로의 항해 를 중심으
로 예이츠가 이상향을 추구하지만, 결국 현실을 긍정하고 있음을 살펴본다.
주제어: 예이츠, 비잔티움 , 비잔티움으로의 항해 , 현실, 이상
저자: 최희섭은 전주대학교 인문대학 교수이며 한국동서비교문학학회 고문, 한국번역
학회 고문, 한국예이츠학회 부회장이다.
____________________________________
118 Hie Sup Choi

William Butler Yeats wrote “Byzantium” in 1930, four years after he

published “Sailing to Byzantium” in 1926. These two poems are often called
Byzantium poems. Though there is a four-year gap between the publication of
the two poems, they seem to treat the same theme and same material. The
most outstanding material is, as we can see in the titles, the ancient city
Byzantium.
As Yeats was keenly interested in Byzantium, he read many books about
Byzantium. Cheol Hwan Woo mentions in his “Yeats’s ‘Byzantium’:
Exposition of What?” that there are several books about Byzantium in his
library (29). Yeats practiced meditation and believed that it has power to
awaken his deeper self (Baekyun, Yoo 185).
Byzantium in the two Byzantium poems was an ancient city of East
Roman Empire, which is now Istanbul in Turkey. Yeats uses the place name
both as a symbol of an eternal world and an artistic world contrasted with
the natural world which suffers contradiction, conflicts, and changing
situations.
According to Gordon and Fletcher, Yeats was first in contact with the
Byzantine art at Ravenna in 1907. At this time, he was mainly interested in
Italian painting of the Renaissance. His main guidebook was Reinach’s Apollo
(1907), which has rarely any remark on the subject of Byzantine art. After
1918, he paid great attention to the historical studies (Gordon and Fletcher
132). Gordon and Fletcher say:

He [Yeats] was reading such books as Burkitt’s Early Eastern Christianity

(1904), W. G. Holmes’s elementary The Age of Justinian and Theodora
(1905/ 1907) with its description of the Golden Throne of the Emperors:
Mrs. Arthur Strong’s Apotheosis and the After Life (1915), and Strzygowski’s
Origin of Christian Church Art (1923)― “searching out signs of the whirling
 Yeats’s Attachment to the Reality in “Sailing to Byzantium” 119

gyres of the historical cone as we see it and hoping that by this study I may
see deeper into what is to come.” This search issued in A Vision (1925), that
strange construct, which has troubled his admirers so much, an amalgam of
history, psychology, and eschatology, in which Byzantium as historical, no
less than as an artistic entity, has an important role. (132-3)

The late nineteenth century saw many books about Byzantium published in
England and other countries in Europe. In England, J. B. Bury’s History of
the Later Roman Empire was published in 1889 and O. M. Dalton’s
Byzantine Art was published in 1911, one copy of which Yeats bought some
years later (Gordon and Fletcher 133). The reason Yeats thought of
Byzantium as the most beautiful and artistic city among the innumerable
cities of the ancient world is that he read such books as O. M. Dalton’s and
W. G. Holmes’s in which Byzantium is described as an ideal city. Norman
Jeffares adds to Yeats’s source Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, The Cambridge Mediaeval History, The Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and other general reference works (212-213).
Gordon and Fletcher insist that whatever Yeats had found and read about
Byzantium in his English sources, in earlier years, had been fragmentary and
often trivial. Dalton’s book describes:

Its form does indeed evoke and quicken the sense of life, but it is a life
elect and spiritual, and not the tumultuous flow of human existence. They
are without the solidity of organisms which rejoice or suffer; they seem to
need no sun and cast no shadow, emerging mysteriously from some
radiance of their own. . . . It is greatest, it is most itself, when it frankly
renounces nature; its highest level is perhaps attained where, as in the best
mosaic, a grave schematic treatment is imposed, where no illusion of
receding distance, no preoccupation with anatomy, is suffered to distract the
eye from the central mystery of the symbol. The figures that ennoble these
walls often seem independent of earth; they owe much of their grandeur to
their detachment. They exert their compelling and almost magical power just
120 Hie Sup Choi

because they stand on the very line between that which lives and that
which is abstracted. (qtd in Gordon and Fletcher 135)

In A Vision Yeats made a comprehensive survey of his thoughts and

philosophy through automatic writing; he describes his feelings when he was
absorbed in the Byzantine culture where religion and art and everyday lives
are in complete harmony:

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 wine-shop some philosophic 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 whaqt was an
instrument of power to princes and clerics, 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, for 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 mand that the vision of a whole people. They would
copy out of old Gospel books those pictures that seemed as sacred as the
text, and yet weave all into a vast design, the work of many that seemed
the work of one, that made building, picture, pattern, metalwork of rail and
lamp, seem but a single image. . . . (A Vision 279-280)

As cited above, we can surmise what Yeats thought and imagined while
writing “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium.” Yeats must have thought of
Byzantium as a spiritual city, especially the spiritual city of artists (Ellmann
& O’Clair 134).
 Yeats’s Attachment to the Reality in “Sailing to Byzantium” 121

Yeats would live in the early Byzantium for a month if it were possible
for him, where the utmost beauty of art is born out of itself without any
labor or sacrifice needed to attain such kind of beauty. It is the beauty of an
ideal world, the beauty eternal and transcending the real world. It is the
beauty with no distinction between spirit and body, life and death. There
appears a golden bird that despises the complex and unpurged images of the
real world where everything is contradictory and changing as time passes; the
golden bird is static and lethargic and fixed in a place, though.
Yeats wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” when he was over sixty; it is not
difficult for us to imagine that Yeats may have felt the decrepitude of his
body and the disillusionment with the material world he could not trust. As
he despised the material world and bodily existence, it is natural that he
should long for the eternal world of art and spirit in Byzantium, the most
idealistic city. The longing for an eternal youth and ideal city is depicted in
this poem.
II

The beginning of “Sailing to Byzantium” shows the poet’s attitude to the

phenomenal world. The speaker turns his back to the natural world and sails
for Byzantium. It begins with the natural world where creatures suffer birth,
growth, sickness, and death, the four stages of sufferings in Buddhist terms.
He leaves for Byzantium with a longing for the everlasting world, which is
the theme of Romantic poets, though he lives in the imperfect world (Ki
Woong, Han 100):

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
122 Hie Sup Choi

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.1)

In the first line, the poet indicates the real world as “that” and admits that
he is old. That country is not suitable for him to live on. “That country” is
Ireland (Ellmann & O’Clair 134). Though he was born and lived in Ireland,
he no longer thinks Ireland is a good country for him to live, for he is old.
It is now a world for the young: that is, the world of body and carnal
desires. He is now on his way to the spiritual and intellectual world.
In “that country” the young seek sensual pleasure: they hug each other
and enjoy their youth, as birds sing of sensual pleasure. Yet, they belong to
dying generations, as they are destined to die sooner or later, just as fish,
birds, and animals do. Salmon come back to their birth place when they are
going to give birth to the next generation and mackerel gather together in the
sea. All the fish and animals and birds live their lives enjoying their fleshly
pleasure and do nothing but praise the present world without paying attention
to the spiritual world where none loses their lives and experiences birth and
growth and death. What they praise and enjoy is the ephemeral natural world
in which they suffer birth, growth, and death: it is a world, in which all the
living creature will disappear sooner or later.
Though Yeats claims that country is not for the old but for the young,
the description is very vivid and concrete. He is very conscious of the world
and in some respect has a strong attachment to the world. This is the
evidence that though he keeps avowedly a dualistic view of life, he seems to
firmly cling to reality, or the phenomenal world.
In the second stanza, an old man is compared to a scarecrow:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
 Yeats’s Attachment to the Reality in “Sailing to Byzantium” 123

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 image of scarecrow described as “a tattered coat upon a stick” in the

second line seems fit to depict a skinny old man. If an old man does not pay
attention to the spiritual world and laments the decrepitude of the body, he is
not different from a scarecrow. The body is a kind of clothes which wrap the
spirit. Over time, just as the clothes wear and become tattered, the body
becomes old and weak. An old man knowing this truth should sing a loud
song instead of lamenting the loss of physical strength; as Lentricchia says, the
difference between the body and the spirit is the level of the quality (104).
It seems that the speaker’s sailing to Byzantium is not voluntary but
compulsory. As the body’s being old, useless and powerless brings the
emancipation of the spirit from the body, an old man seeks the spiritual
world. As Unterecker says, man is nothing but an existence who is sacrificed
by the tyranny of time (174).
The “mortal dress” in line four is the skin of a mortal man and “every
tatter” in it means all the parts of our body. The spirit wrapped in the skin
should sing, loudly praising our spirit, or human body is the same as the
scarecrow in the field. We should learn the greatness and solemnity in the
school of life: in the singing school of Byzantium, we should learn not the
carnal desires of the youth but the enjoyment of the art made by the artist’s
soul. That country is opposite to Byzantium.
The speaker, having left the real world and crossed the sea, which lies
between the natural and the ideal world, arrives at the holy city of
Byzantium in the third stanza:
124 Hie Sup Choi

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.

The speaker prays to the saints. The “sages” in the first line is a deliberate
change from saints, as if to secularize the vision; the fire and mosaic are
made so indissoluble that it is impossible to distinguish the metaphor from
the thing described (Ellmann & O’Clair 135). As the fire is “God’s holy
fire,” it neither blows out by wind nor can burn up all the unspiritual things.
The saints Yeats sees in his vision are the dwellers in the everlasting
heaven: the concrete images in the mosaic of Byzantine art. When Yeats
visited Rome with Mrs. Yeats in 1925, he concentrated on seeing the finest
examples of Early Christian art. After six weeks’ travel, he brought back
photographs of those monuments, such as the mosaic at La Zisa, Palermo. It
shows its two palm-trees between peacocks, flanking formalized fruit-bearing
trees with birds in the branches, emblems of immortality (Gordon and
Fletcher 133).
Gordon and Fletcher describe the mosaic:

The conventional forms of Byzantine mosaic seem to deny the nature from
which they derive. Those images, in fact, were designed to express the
Divine, the supernatural, the transcendent realm which opposes the flux of
time and nature. The personal application of the symbol is intensified by
Yeats’s obsession with old age, change, decay, and death, and with the
wisdom that outlasts them. The symbol, then expresses the permanence of
the artist in the perfection of his artifices; but it contains more than this,
for Byzantium, at its highest point, represented for Yeats a civilization in
 Yeats’s Attachment to the Reality in “Sailing to Byzantium” 125

which all forms of thought, art, and life interpenetrated one another, and
where the artist “spoke to the multitude and the few alike.” (Fletcher 136)

Yeats here uses the images as a symbol of heaven. The speaker asks the
sages in the holy fire to whirl down from their timeless setting to his point
in time and burn up his heart (Ellmann & O’Clair 135). He also asks them
to be his teacher and teach his soul. As Curtis Bradford says, he now prays
to the wise of all ages and cultures who have entered before him eternity or,
as Yeats would have said, “the other life,” so that they become the singing
masters of his soul. Yeats’s protagonist beseeches the sages to leave
momentarily the holy fire which symbolizes their eternal ecstasy and to help
him put off the carnal desire and become a golden bird singing on a golden
bough (Bradford 112).
Yeats has a belief that he could get an eternal life through art. He seems
to have seen the possibility and wants to divest himself of the human
features which have animal’s character and get an eternal life (Kiwoong Han
107). In “The Tables of the Law,” Yeats spoke of “that supreme art which is
to win us from life and gather us into eternity like dove into their dove-cots”
(Ellmann & O’Clair 135).
Because the speaker is sick with carnal desire tied to the phenomenal
world, he asks the holy spirits of the saints to consume his heart away. As
the heart indicates his body tied to feelings, he wants to get out of the body
and become assimilated with the images of the saints with his spirit.
The next stanza explains why he wants to go into the eternal world of
art:

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
126 Hie Sup Choi

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.

Once he is divested of his body and gets out of nature, he is to be born

again not as a natural body but a form which lives an eternal life. In a note
to this poem, Yeats writes, “I have read somewhere that in the Emperor’s
palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds
that sang (Ellmann & O’Clair 135).” The bird is not a natural thing but an
artifice as Frank Kermode says:

The bird must absolutely be a bird of artifice; the entire force of the poem
－
for Yeats depended upon this otherwise he would scarcely have bothered
about Moore’s characteristic, and of course intelligent, quibble. (103)

Yeats imagines a golden bird, made by a goldsmith, singing of the past,

present and future to the emperor, lords, and ladies of Byzantium on the
golden bough. The golden bird lives an everlasting life, not becoming a slave
of carnal desire. But Sturge Moore attacks this bird: “Your Sailing to
Byzantium, magnificent as the first three stanzas are, lets me down in the
fourth, as such a glodsmith’s bird is as much nature as a man’s body,
especially if it only sings like Homer and Shakespeare of what is past or
passing or to come to Lords and Ladies (qtd. in Unterecker 218-219).” Yeats
says that it evades all the complexities of the phenomenal world such as
contradiction and conflict but enjoys eternal happiness of harmony and order.
But the golden bird is not an unperishable form but a less perishable form
than flesh (Unterecker 5).
 Yeats’s Attachment to the Reality in “Sailing to Byzantium” 127

III

Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” begins with a song of the natural world.

The speaker arrives at the state where reconciliation and solution of all the
conflicts and struggle are achieved by burning up all the fleshly and
unspiritual things in the holy fire. He longs to be a golden bird, praying to
the saints in the holy fire. Some critics read this poem as an expression of
the poet’s romantic impulse to escape from reality and sail to the visionary
world of Byzantium. It may be true, but we should pay attention to the fact
that the place he arrived at may be an ideal world, and that he wants to
become a golden bird, “such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make.” He
avowedly says his bodily form will not be derived from any natural thing,
but the form, if it takes any form, cannot be purely spiritual and cannot
divested of the natural world. He ends “by symbolically turning back to the
natural world from which he has sailed” (Diggory 72).
The speaker apparently sails to Byzantium, but is deeply attached to the
phenomenal world. After he arrives at Byzantium, he longs to be born again
into an artifice resembling a natural object. We, therefore, can conclude that
he has a strong desire to continue the life in the phenomenal world. “What is
past, or passing, or to come” in the last line is closely connected with
“Whatever is begotten, born, and dies” in the first line. That leads us to
think that though Yeats longs to be accepted into the world of the ideal and
the spiritual, he will not leave reality, keeping an eye on that country of the
young.

Notes

1) Poems are cited from William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London:
Macmillan, 1971).
128 Hie Sup Choi

Works cited

Baekyun, Yoo. “W. B. Yeats’s ‘Byzantium’ and Zen Meditation.” The Yeats
Journal of Korea 35 (2011): 185-207.
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John Unterecker, ed. Yeats: A Collection of Critical Essays. (Twentieth
Century Views) Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall Inc., 1963: 93-130.
[Cheol Hwan, Woo. “Yeats’s ‘Byzantium’: Exposition of What?” The Yeats Journal
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Diggory, Terence. Yeats and American Poetry. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1983.
Ellmann, Richard. The Identity of Yeats. London: Faber and Faber, 1964.
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Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. New York: Macmillan, 1957.
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(2007): 97-114.]
한기웅. 예이츠와 키이츠의 시간의 극복: 비잔티움으로의 항해 와 가을에게 를
중심으로 , 한국예이츠저널 27(2007): 97-114.
Lentricchia, Frank. The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of
W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.
Unterecker, John. A Reader’s Guide to W. B. Yeats. London: Thames and Hudson.
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Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1971.
___. A Vision. London: Macmillan, 1978.
 Yeats’s Attachment to the Reality in “Sailing to Byzantium” 129

Manuscript peer-review process:

receipt acknowledged: October 10, 2014.

revision received: Nov. 10, 2014.

publication approved: Dec. 25, 2014.

Edited by: Young Suck Rhee