Not
merely a nationalist bard, deeply religious and yet pagan,
deeply involved in the occultist movements of the late
19th and the early 20th century
and still most at home in his native county of Sligo,
Ireland – William Butler Yeats is difficult to portray
coherently without considering every facet of his motley
intellectual roots.
The
creative period of Yeats stretched over a time of great
changes in the world of art and literature. The Irish
poet’s works can be linked to the Symbolist movement,
but he was also a contemporary to the Modernists such
as T. S. Eliot and T. E. Hulme. Other parallels may be
drawn to the Romantics of the early 19th century,
particularly William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom
he himself studied. Yeats was thus a poet of many levels,
and it is challenging to unravel the layers of metaphors
and symbols in his poetry and search for his sources of
inspiration.
The
purpose of this essay is to find the sources and inspirations
to Yeats’s two so-called Byzantine poems and the ideas
that led the poet to express himself and his philosophy
in those verses. "Sailing to Byzantium" and
the later "Byzantium" are clearly related in
imagery; can they also be linked together thematically?
At
a first glance, the poems seem to contrast images of nature
and life with images of "artifice" and eternity.
The former are viewed with scorn, while the state of the
latter images is seen as desirable and ideal. The speaker
seems to turn his back on organic life and seeks liberation
in the artificial and eternal. However, is this all there
is to it? My theory is that a study through Yeats’s many
layers of meaning may reveal a more complex message. The
focus will be set on one particular recurring symbol,
the mechanical golden bird. I will try to study how Yeats’s
ideas and work methods are revealed through this single
image. What is his message and with which means does he
convey it?
My
essay consists of seven sections. The second will analyse
the construction and technique of the two poems on a more
superficial level, and only dwell upon the most obvious
interpretations of the symbolisms and meanings. Here I
lean heavily on A. Norman Jeffares’s excellent and thorough
works on the poetry of Yeats. In the third section, the
scope focalises on the bird image and goes through the
historical background and possible sources for it. A deeper
analysis is intended: What does the bird represent: the
artificial, the artist? Why does it scorn the living birds?
Does its role change from one poem to the other? A comparison
will be made with other birds in Yeats’s poetic language
and their symbolic significance.
The
fourth section deals with Yeats’s inspirational sources.
Which movements influenced him in his choices of style
and subject matter? Can he be associated with any specific
artistic movement of the late 19th and early
20th century? Nature and artifice occupy opposing
positions. Why does Yeats seem to be on the side of the
artificial and the artificer? His treatment of the two
opposites is compared to some typical works and philosophies
of Romantics and Modernists. The influence of Christian
beliefs of the polarity of the flesh and the spirit, as
well as Yeats’s interest in the occult, will be studied.
Are there other works by Yeats, which deal with this problem?
The fifth section is dedicated to Byzantium and the reasons
why Yeats chose this city as the location for the two
poems, and the significance of Byzantine art in Yeats’s
philosophy. In the sixth section, his correspondence with
his friend and colleague T. Sturge Moore on the subject
of the poems is examined, and we understand how Yeats
saw it necessary to write a second, more developed poem
after "Sailing to Byzantium", and in the seventh,
the outlines of Yeats’s philosophy behind the bird image
are presented. Finally, the results are summarised in
the conclusion.
"Sailing
to Byzantium" is a poem of four stanzas in ottava
rima, the rhyme scheme ABABABCC. The lines are seemingly
quite freely composed and the rhymes are not always pure
("unless"/"dress"/"magnificence";
"wall"/"soul"/"animal").
It was written in the autumn of 1926 and belongs to Yeats’
later period, together with "Leda and the Swan"
and "Among School Children". The collection
The Tower (1928) is said to contain the richest
texture of his poetry, sprung as it is from the switch
of interest from the Celtic twilight period to life’s
riddles (Jeffares The Poetry 42).
Accordingly,
the work on "Sailing to Byzantium" began as
an expression of dislike of the process of ageing and
the frustration at the contrast of youth and vigour (Jeffares
The Poetry 42). The imagery of the first stanza
is vivid and full of symbols of life and recreation: "The
young/ In one another’s arms, birds in the trees … The
salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, /Fish, flesh,
or fowl, commend all summer long/ Whatever is begotten,
born and dies"(Yeats The Poems 217). In the
second stanza follows a description of an old man and
his sad existence amongst beings uninterested in the intellectual
achievements of the ancient and the experienced. The poem’s
speaker announces his decision to leave that country of
teeming, sensual life and sail "To the holy city
of Byzantium." After this turning-point, the speaker
in the third stanza calls out to the "sages standing
in God’s holy fire", the agents of his transition
from the land of the living, to free his soul from his
mortal body and desires: "fastened to a dying animal/
It knows not what it is;" and to gather him "Into
the artifice of eternity". Finally, the fourth stanza
describes an artificial object, namely a bird of gold,
"such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make". This
mechanical device can sing and entertains the Imperial
court of Byzantium, singing "of what is past, or
passing, or to come". This final image of artifice
is a contrast to the living birds (and other creatures)
in the first stanza, and also to the "scarecrow"-like
old man in the second, whose soul might "clap its
hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in
its mortal dress", but does not, since nobody would
listen.
The
second Byzantine poem was written in 1930, four years
after "Sailing to Byzantium". Structurally it
has important differences. There are five stanzas with
eight lines each, of which the first three are in iambic
pentameter, then a trochaic line with four stresses, then
one in iambic pentameter, two short lines, with at least
two stresses each, finally one in iambic pentameter. The
rhyme scheme is AABBCDDC, but not always consistently
so. The whole structure seems freer than in the preceding
poem. The loosening form is tightened by repetition of
key words and phrases.
In
"Byzantium", less space is devoted to the natural
images. As early as in the fifth line of the first stanza,
they are already rejected: "A starlit or a moonlit
dome disdains/ All that man is/ … The fury and the mire
of human veins"(Yeats The Poems 280). Just
as in "Sailing to Byzantium", the soul is purified
in fire, but its travels are further elaborated upon.
The images of ancient Byzantium – the "cathedral"
is probably the Hagia Sophia at Constantinople, and the
golden bird, the "Emperor’s pavement" and the
smithies can all be traced to various historical sources
on the Byzantine Empire – provide a background to the
spiritual journey of the souls after life which leads
into the sea on the backs of dolphins. Interestingly,
the journey starts here in the ancient, even mythic capital
itself, while in the previous poem the beginning was set
in a young and blooming Ireland. The sea plays a key role
in both cases; it can be interpreted as the soul’s long
and possibly even dangerous road after death to another
level of existence.
Is
there a difference in tone in the two poems?
According
to A. Norman Jeffares the "value of the image or
the artefact comes out strongly in ‘Byzantium’, where
Yeats is not so much concerned with ‘Sailing to Byzantium’s’
… immense natural vigour as with the state arrived at
by the creative imagination, the stillness at the core
of the flame-begotten spirits" (Jeffares The Poetry
50).
Both
poems are about the same theme, but Yeats develops his ideas
further in the latter one. In addition, the apparent opposition
of nature and art in the earlier poem is not that obvious
in "Byzantium". Even though "the fury and
the mire" of earthly life are dismissed from early
on, the theme permeates the poem and recurs in the three
last stanzas:
"…scorn
aloud / In glory of changeless metal / Common bird or
petal / And all complexities of mire and blood."
"…Where
blood-begotten spirits come / And all complexities of
fury leave…"
"Astraddle
on the dolphin’s mire and blood, / Spirit after spirit!
… Marbles of the dancing floor / Break bitter furies of
complexity…"
The
beauty of the mortal world is not without its charms,
even in Yeats’s eyes. He is prepared to draw inspiration
from it, although he is painfully aware of its fleeting
nature.
Jeffares
writes of other poetry of Yeats’s from the period of "Byzantium":
"This is an acceptance of life (…) which is opposed
to his Byzantine goals" (Jeffares The Poetry 52).
Even in "Byzantium", the point Yeats strives
to make is something more than merely a juxtaposition
of organic life (bad) and artifice (good).
Background
and possible sources
A
visitor at the court of Constantine Porphyrogenetos, Emperor
of Byzantium, describes among the wonders at the hall of
audience a tree made of gold and bronze, standing in front
of the Imperial throne:
Different
kinds of birds, also made of gilded bronze, filled
its boughs and chirped like real birds, each in its
own way… When at my arrival the lions roared and the
birds sang each after its own tongue, I was struck
by neither horror nor astonishment, because I had
heard much about the ceremony from well-informed sources…
(Liutprand of Cremona, quoted by Zilliacus 90-91;
my translation)
The
purpose of this display of wealth and wonders of technology
at the Byzantine court was undoubtedly to induce fear
and awe in state visitors from "barbaric" countries.
It implied that the Emperor, God’s representative on earth,
had the power to make lions roar and birds sing at his
command, indeed, to make lions and birds, with
almost the same voices as the living.
Yeats’s
knowledge of Byzantium and the gilded bird at the court
was apparently derived from W. G. Holmes, The Age of
Justinian and Theodora (1905), Mrs A. Strong, Apotheosis
and After Life: Three Lectures on Certain Phases of Art
and Religion in the Roman Empire (1915), and O. M.
Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology (1911). Other
possible sources are Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, The Cambridge Mediaeval History, and
the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Jeffares A New
211).
A
related, though maybe surprising source of inspiration might
be a fairy-tale by Hans Christian Andersen, "The Emperor’s
Nightingale" (Nattergalen, Andersen 181). This
has been suggested by E. Schanzer in "’Sailing to Byzantium’,
Keats and Anderson", English Studies, XLI (Dec.
1960) (Jeffares A New 215). The Emperor of China
loves to listen to the plain little nightingale’s beautiful
song. One day he receives a gift from the Emperor of Japan,
who presents him with a mechanical nightingale made of gold:
…it
was a little work of art, lying in a box, an artificial
nightingale, which was supposed to look like the living
one, but it was covered with inlaid diamonds, rubies
and sapphires; as soon as you winded up the artificial
bird, it would sing one of the melodies which the
real one sang, and all the while the tail went up
and down and gleamed of silver and gold. (Andersen
184, my translation)
The
clockwork bird becomes the whole court’s favourite
toy, and the real nightingale leaves quietly.
However, when the golden nightingale’s machinery
is irreparably broken, the Emperor falls sick
with sorrow for his old friend, and the nightingale
returns to save his life with its song.
Contrarily
to the moral in Andersen’s tale, Yeats seems to place
the artificial bird above the ordinary, living ones. Organic
life is depicted as a wild, passionate cycle of unconscious
suffering, which the thinking man strives to escape. Art
provides this escape, since a being made of metal or stone
is virtually immortal – or, at least, more long-lived
than a human being. In addition, an artist who creates
such objects becomes himself immortal through his works,
as his memory lives on in them.
The
golden bird is an appropriate symbol for the artist and
the work of art alike. A singing bird is a common symbol
for a poet, and this particular fowl keeps singing "To
lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing,
or to come". It is not only a poet, but also a historian,
and, what is most important, a visionary. As the examination
of Yeats’s interest in the occult will show, he was much
concerned with visions and supernatural ways of communication.
The
bird is also an ancient image of the soul: "Often
the soul has been conceived as a bird ready to take flight.
This conception has probably left traces in most languages,
and it lingers as a metaphor in poetry" (Frazer 181).
Old beliefs among peoples all over the world took great
care of different situations when the soul might take
its chance and fly away from the body, for instance while
sleeping. Some particularly gifted individuals, like witches
and shamans, were believed to be able to send out their
souls on journeys to other worlds, often in the shape
of birds, and then return unscathed.
Other
Birds in Yeats’s Works
Yeats’s
poetry abounds in birds: swans, doves, sparrows, hawks
and falcons, and even a phoenix. In "The White Birds",
an early poem from The Rose (1893), the birds are
lovers, flying over the sea. In The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919), the birds become a more spiritual image in the
title poem, and in "The Hawk", the "yellow-eyed
hawk of the mind" seems to signify the spirited intellect
(Yeats The Poems 167). In "The Second Coming",
the falcon in the first stanza is man, losing his orientation
and his connection with the falconer (Christ?) in a turbulent
world (Jeffares A New 210). In "Leda and the
Swan" (1923), the disguise of Zeus who seduces the
mortal woman becomes a symbol of the divine, a terrible
and irresistible power which seizes the human being. The
bird is an image always in connection with spirituality
and divinity. Yeats is building on a long tradition. Birds
and their ability to fly have always intrigued mankind,
and while some religions have associated them with the
dead, and other have equipped their deities with wings
or bird heads, as the Egyptian Horus and the Aztec Quetzalcoatl,
to provide them with the same supernatural qualities which
they associated with falcons or quetzal birds, Christianity
depicts the Holy Ghost, the most abstract part of the
Trinity, as a white dove.
Does
the bird's role change from one poem to another?
"Sailing
to Byzantium" ends with the speaker choosing the
shape of the golden bird for his existence "out of
nature". The bird inhabits the entire last stanza,
while of "Byzantium’s" five stanzas the third
one is dedicated to it. The third stanza is the middle
one, and thus the poem seems to move on beyond the image
of the mechanic device – but whither? I will return to
that question, but the role of the bird has certainly
changed. It is described more emotionally than its counterpart
in "Sailing to Byzantium" is, which "sings
… Of what is past, or passing, or to come" without
feelings or engagement. The bird in "Byzantium"
actually "scorn[s] aloud" mortal creatures and
their joys and sufferings "by the moon embittered".
Surely, a mechanical device cannot feel embittered by
any celestial object. What is there in the image of the
moon that is so objectionable? Probably its fickle character;
during its cycle it grows full, then wanes, and then disappears
completely. Most likely, it serves as a symbol for Yeats’s
idea of the cycle of life and death, and, in a wider sense,
the cycle of the history of mankind. The bird is not completely
liberated from the troubles of its living relatives. It
is perhaps more closely related to the frustrated artist
himself, still trapped in a world of dirt and pain, but
longing for a higher state of existence.
4.
Inspirational Movements and Philosophical Sources
The
Romantic Movement, undoubtedly, was a great source of
inspiration for Yeats. His early poetry with its fascination
with old Irish myths and fairy-tales, the beautiful landscapes
of the Irish countryside, and the mixture of ancient eastern
philosophy and Occultist imagery, fits neatly in the tradition
of Blake and Shelley.
In
comparing John Keats’s "Ode to a Nightingale"
with "Sailing to Byzantium", many interesting
parallels meet the eye. The theme is the longing for a
distant place, preferably a mythical location somewhere
in the Mediterranean, and the centre of the poem is a
singing bird. Keats describes it in words that reverberate
in Yeats’s lines: "Thou wast 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…"(Keats 22). All the while
"The weariness, the fever, and the fret" of
everyday life is compared to the ideal existence in "the
country green, /Dance, and Provenç al song, and sunburnt
mirth!"(Keats 19-20). The narrator longs to follow
the song of the bird to the dark and lush forest "on
the viewless wings of Poesy" (Keats 20).
Katharine
M. Wilson, who analyses the "Ode to a Nightingale"
in a Jungian light, writes: "one can easily see why
the nightingale should be a dream symbol for the Self.
Singing in the dark and quiet of night from the heart
of a wood, it does in external reality what the symbol
of the Self does in inward experience" (Wilson 122).
Keats
revels in nature imagery and uses it to describe supernatural
bliss in detail, and the bird whose immortal song he praises
is clearly a living, mortal creature. What the speaker
turns his back on is not natural life as such, but the
transience of beauty and dreams in the ordinary lives
of mankind "where but to think is to be full of sorrow".
His search for redemption leads him to the manifold beauty
of nature, which is mixed with religious allusions: "…soft
incense hangs upon the boughs", "thy high requiem",
"the sad heart of Ruth", from the Book of Ruth
in the Old Testament.
Yeats’s
"Sailing to Byzantium", in contrast, carries
this message: "Those who generate and die, perpetually
imperfect in their world of becoming, have praise only
for that world; the old man has no part in it, […] hoping
only for escape into the world of complete being, the
world of the self-begotten", the artifice of eternity,
as it were (Kermode 86-87). Keats, still young, does not
seem to feel alienated by the images of the blooming of
nature and life in spring and summer. Keats embraces those
images and makes them his own, seeing nature as the road
to spirituality, while Yeats struggles with what he experiences
as a contradiction. Although inspired by the Romantics,
Yeats deals with other problems in his works than they
do.
The
Symbolists and the Decadence
Another
literary movement, which Yeats has been associated with,
is the Symbolists. Since Yeats was a contemporary of the
movement and its greatest representative in Britain, Oscar
Wilde, an investigation of the Symbolists’ ideology is called
for. Obviously, merely the use of symbols does not make
a poet a Symbolist. The Aesthetic movement and the Decadents
of the 1890s stand for a slightly different philosophy than
he. Sexuality and death are connected, just as in the first
stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium", but Yeats’s
ensuing vision of an ideal future is missing from the works
of Mallarmé and Baudelaire.
[I]t
is unnecessary to look to […] any Frenchman for the
symbolism of […] Yeats, who was a symbolist long before
he heard of the French. He based his symbolism upon
the poetry of Blake, Shelley and Rossetti, and, above
all these, upon the occult. (William York Tindall,
"The Symbolism of W. B. Yeats", in John
Unterecker, Yeats. A Collection of Critical Essays,
New York 1963; quoted by Timm 144)
How,
then, is Yeats to be placed in the literary movement which
he later became associated with? The modernist writers
and poets in the Anglo-Saxon world represented different
ways of breaking with the old schools of realism and romanticism,
and it is difficult to discern any philosophy or ideology
common to them all. In art, the term "modernism"
could be applied to cubism, futurism, Dadaism, or any
of the groundbreaking new styles, which had left the traditional
views of the meaning of art behind. Common themes seemed
to be the embracing of technology and an optimistic view
on scientific development, while there also bloomed a
new interest in the art of "primitive" cultures
and a longing towards the uninhibited, "natural"
sensuality and emotions which were believed to exist in
such societies.
Yeats’s
own criticism of antiquated conceptions of morale was
not tied to any programme of new collective norms, but
highlighted the outstanding individual. Yeats saw the
conditions of living disappear for the carriers of a great
culture with the advent of democracy and materialism,
and these achievements of the modern civilisation meant
for him the end of civilisation itself. A revaluation
was necessary. Compared with his forebears of the Romantic,
for instance William Blake, whose visions of the salvation
of Man were always concerned with the whole mankind,
Yeats stays a pure individualist. When asked by his friend
T. Sturge Moore how to illustrate the final scene in "Byzantium"
with spirits leaving the city on dolphin-back, how many
there should be of those, Yeats simply answered: "One
dolphin, one man." (Jeffares The Poetry 51)
Correspondingly, in the poems, the golden bird sings alone,
although the historical sources (e. g. Bishop Liutprand)
mention several birds on a tree.
The
movement in literature towards what we call modernism
had to try to break with the conventions of storytelling.
Not only the style, but also the themes of literature
were subjected to radical experiments. James Joyce wrote
almost a thousand pages about a day in Dublin; Virginia
Woolf defied the norms of feminine writing while also
rejecting the traditional masculine style, and wrote stream-of-consciousness
novels lacking any action.
A
remarkable modernist poet, William Carlos Williams, once
defined a poem as a "machine of words" (Williams
54). He may serve as an example of a poet who redefined
the role of the poet and the complex concept of "image".
Williams saw the poet as a bricklayer, because he or she
uses prefabricated material, i. e. words and metaphors
(Halter 32). He blended his need for an indigenous, modern
American art with the current propagation of technology
and a new popular culture based on it. I will return to
the connection between the poet and the workman or craftsman
in the next chapter.
The
Modernists came to criticise formerly firmly held values,
such as religion and belief in the progress of society.
Some modernist critics characterise the movement by its
scepticism and ironic sensibility, its Nietzschean enterprise
of calling into question all religious faith. Any tendencies
towards the mysticism in T. S. Eliot’s, Ezra Pound’s or
indeed Yeats’s works are dismissed by such critics as
"aesthetic positions" (Materer 7). Later critics,
such as Timothy Materer and Leon Surette, have instead
emphasised the modernists’ considerable interest in the
occult and their often profound belief in certain phenomena,
in Yeats’s case the communication with spirits through
a medium. This interest is mirrored in the subject matter
and the language of their poetry, although often seen
through a veil of careful irony, as if the poet fears
the incredulity and ridicule of his audience.
Of
the Byzantine poems, the earlier "Sailing to Byzantium"
is quoted more often in criticism, and more has been written
about it than its younger pendant. Possibly "Byzantium"
is seen as nothing more than a paraphrase of the previous
poem, then again, the mystical content is heavier in it
than in "Sailing to…", which can be read as
the outcry of an old man, weary of life – the very superficial
duality, so neatly expressed through the composition of
the four stanzas, which is diffused in the second poem.
The "blood-begotten spirits" "astraddle
on the dolphin’s mire and blood" are more difficult
to interpret symbolically, without considering Yeats’s
seriously intended dabblings with the occult.
It
was hardly possible to escape Christian values in a society
like the Irish, or indeed, anywhere in Europe or America
at that time. The Christian view of the flesh as sinful,
as it is born in Original Sin, and the soul as pure or
at least eternal, while the earthly body is subject to
ageing and decaying, undoubtedly influenced Yeats’s thinking
in one way or another. Yeats grew up in a religious family,
Protestant by tradition, but his father’s atheism must
have planted a seed of doubt in his mind, for although
he craved for something more spiritual and mysterious
in his life, than his father’s house-gods of reason and
science (Darwin, Tyndall and John Stuart Mill) could provide
him with, partly because he wanted to break with his father’s
rationality and his respectability and partly to give
his works a fertile growing-ground, he did not feel compelled
to turn towards the Church of Ireland. Instead, a friend
in Dublin introduced him to the Theosophists, and in 1885,
Yeats founded together with him and a few others the Dublin
Hermetic Society, a forum to discuss the occult sciences
and pseudo-sciences which were en vogue at that time:
Odic force, Spiritualism, Esoteric Buddhism and whatnot.
When the Yeats family moved to London in 1887, Yeats joined
the London Lodge of the Theosophists, led by its famous
founder Madame Blavatsky. The theosophist doctrine was
a mixture of Hindu and Buddhist elements, mingled with
Western occultist traditions such as the Cabalistic, Neoplatonic,
Hermetic, and Rosicrucian. Materer states that "Madame
Blavatsky […] raided Gnostic traditions" while formulating
spiritualistic doctrines (Materer 174).
The
duality inherent in orthodox Christianity was even more
emphasised in the Gnostic tradition, which arose and flourished
in the 2nd
century and was finally branded as a heresy by the founding
fathers of the Church. According to Gnosticism, the Creator
of the world, a secondary deity called the Demiurge, is
evil, and his creation is evil, since matter and the body
binds the spirit and hinders its development. Christ is
good and has come to lead the human race towards redemption,
and to free it from the bonds of the material world. The
name of the movement derives from the Greek word gnosis,
knowledge, usually used by the Gnostics in the sense of
"revelation" which gave them certain mystic
knowledge for salvation, which others did not possess
(Brewer 468). At least one critic, Harold Bloom, places
Yeats in a Gnostic tradition because of its fascination
with the contrast between the material world and the life
of the soul (Materer 78).
Yeats
gained much insight in the roots of occultism, and became
firmly convinced that it was possible to communicate with
the spirits of the deceased through mediums. He was introduced
to the works of Emanuel Swedenborg and Eliphas Lévi. The
idea of the pilgrimage, which every individual has to make,
through life and beyond, and which is a part of the structure
of the universe, also became central to his philosophy and
goes as the main thread through both Byzantine poems, with
the spirit’s travel through all phases of existence. However,
the Theosophist ideal of the devout disciple did not suit
Yeats. In the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he found
a society fitting to his needs, and he joined it in 1890.
There he found symbolism, imagery and linguistic resources
based on Western traditions such as the Cabala and the Greek
mysteries. It is worth citing a formal statement of his
beliefs, which he made in 1901:
"I
believe in the practice and philosophy of what we
have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the
evocation of spirits, … in the visions of truth in
the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and
I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think,
been handed down from early times and been the foundations
of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are
That
the borders of our minds 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.
That
the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that
our memories are part of one great memory, the memory
of Nature herself.
That
this great mind and great memory can be evoked
by symbols. (Yeats, Essays and Introductions,
28; quote Hough 1984. My italics)
"Symbols"
means here not just the literary symbolism
of poetry, but also something more concrete.
A popular practice among the members of the
Golden Dawn was to meditate on certain objects,
shapes and colours, which had to be manufactured
by the members themselves. There exists an
obvious link between these rituals and Yeats’s
praise of the artisan, particularly the Byzantine
artist, the "Grecian goldsmith",
who created symbols of divinity and thus established
a link between himself and the divine. In
the same manner as the artisan and the poet
were connected, the poet and the magician
were essentially the same in their conjuring
up of images and visions from the "great
memory" of mankind.
As
early as 1907 Yeats had visited the Romanesque church
of S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy, and seen the
"sages", the saints and apostles on the mosaic-clad
walls of the basilica. Yeats had revisited Ravenna in
November 1924. He was clearly inspired by the Byzantine
mosaics at Monreale and the Capella Palatina at Palermo
(Jeffares A New 211). The art of this period continues
to intrigue him and provide him with material for his
poetry.
Yeats
writes in one of the most often quoted passages in The
Vision:
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 philosophical
worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions,
the supernatural descending nearer to him than to
Plotinus even…(A Vision 279)
Yeats
regarded Justinian’s reign in Byzantium as a
great age of building in which Byzantine art
was perfected. A building like St Sophia, the
"great cathedral" with its "starlit
or moonlit dome" of "Byzantium",
preceded the climax of that civilisation.
Already
in 1931, for a broadcast on his poems, he developed
this idea of the city:
Now
I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for
it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some
of my thoughts upon that subject I have put into a
poem called ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. When Irishmen
were illuminating the Books of Kells [in the 8th
century] and making the jewelled croziers in the National
Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilisation
and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolise
the search for the spiritual life by a journey to
that city. (Jeffares A New 211)
Byzantium
is the holy city where art and spiritual life
are ultimately fused (Hough 71-72). It is not
so much the historical city, as a mythic place,
comparable to the heavenly Jerusalem of the
Apocalypse of St John or the legendary Islands
of the Immortal of medieval legend. The historical
Byzantium was invaded by the Turks at the end
of the Middle Ages, and the Empire was lost,
but the very fact that Byzantine Constantinople
did not exist anymore made it the ideal city
to use as an otherworldly symbol.
The
art of Byzantium adapted to the needs of the
church. The concept of the artist as an individual,
who founds his own schools and creates his own
style, was unknown. Yeats wrote about the role
of the Byzantine "artificer", as he
saw it:
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 [sic] the vision of a whole people. (Yeats
A Vision 279-80, my brackets)
According
to some critics, Byzantine art kept Yeats interested
because it gave him a sense of an image totally
estranged from specifically human considerations
(Kermode 88). T. E. Hulme celebrated Byzantine
art as being "life-alien, remote from organic
life and even detesting it"(Kermode 124-125).
This writer and philosopher, who in spite of
his short life (1883-1917) was an important
member of the Modernist avant-garde, developed
a highly personal philosophy, which influenced
contemporary writers immensely. Particularly
his theories on the meaning of art are of interest
in examining Yeats’s thinking.
According
to Hulme, the history of art consists of the alteration
of two great movements: geometrical art, and its counterpart,
"naturalism" or "realism". Hulme sees
the upcoming new schools of art as a development towards
a new "geometric" period. His ideas aroused
a great deal of interest amongst the writers and art critics
of that time.
As
in Byzantine art, where the icons lack earthly shadows and
the sky never is blue (because blue is the colour of the
earthly sky) but golden, the difference between nature (the
life that surrounds us) and the spiritual world of images
is profound.
Even
the drilled pupil of the eye, when the drill is in
the hand of some Byzantine worker in ivory, undergoes
a somnambulistic change, for its deep shadow among
the faint lines of the tablet, its mechanical circle,
where all else is rhythmical and flowing, give to
Saint or Angel a look of some great bird staring at
a miracle. (Yeats A Vision 279-80)
The
artificial bird is more than a man-made object.
It exists in a world where "the fury and
the mire of human veins" and the ever-rolling
cycle of unconscious death and regeneration
are meaningless. In Yeats’s Byzantium, "all
is image and there are no contrasts and no costs"
(Kermode 89). This artificial paradise is not
dead, though separate from the world of the
living, but it resounds with the music of the
artificial birds.
I
would still like to argue that in spite of all these points,
Yeats is not fully rejecting the natural world. Although
nature seems to be expelled from the mechanical garden,
the nature and life in this poem are not subject to decay,
as in the poetry and prose of the symbolists and decadents.
It is preserved in the eternity of art. This concern for
natural beauty that Yeats longs to hold on to, although
he realises that that is impossible, is peculiar to his
works. The first stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium"
is as much a celebration of the natural forces of life,
as it is a lamentation of the loss of youthful vigour
and the ability to enjoy life. The German critic Eitel
Friedrich Timm, who compares Yeats to Nietzsche in certain
aspects, writes: "[I]t can full well be said that
Yeats was one of the most important poets of this century,
who made the problem of the relationship between art and
life a central concern of his poetical work, and in the
sense of Nietzsche placed ‘life in the highest power’
as his goal" (Timm 71, my translation).
Originally,
"Sailing to Byzantium" was supposed to be the
final version, but Yeats came to realise that the poem’s
obvious duality – the conflict between the mindless "sensual
music" of animal life versus the immortal "artifice
of eternity", embodied in the bird – left an unsatisfactory
impression on the reader. The constructive criticism by
a friend made him decide to develop his ideas in another
poem, instead of rewriting the old one. According to A.
Norman Jeffares, "‘Byzantium’ … originated from T.
Sturge Moore’s criticism of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, which
had showed Yeats that ‘the idea needed exposition’"
(Jeffares A New 289) On 16 April 1930 Moore wrote:
Your
Sailing to Byzantium, magnificent as the first
three stanzas are, lets me down in the fourth, as
such a goldsmith’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. (Yeats Correspondence 162)
On
October 4th, Yeats sent Moore a copy
of the new poem:
The
poem originates from a criticism of yours. You objected
to the last verse of "Sailing to Byzantium"
because a bird made by a goldsmith was just as natural
as anything else. That showed me that the idea needed
exposition. (Yeats Correspondence 164)
For
Moore, the bird belongs to the same material
world as the human hand that created it. He
sees no fundamental differences between natural
and artificial forms, since a human being can
touch and experience both. The bird "cannot
sing of any other state of existence because
it cannot know of, or belong to, such a state"
(Corbett 245). In his view, Yeats’s use of the
bird as a symbol for a spiritual level of existence
has failed. Besides, Moore’s personal philosophy
does not admit any possibilities for mankind
to speak about such a state, nor allow it to
be seen as a solution to the "fury and
the mire". Moore’s opinion is that "understanding
is always grounded in the experience of our
sensuous human life" (Corbett 245). To
seek liberation from the circle of existence
is pointless. Yeats has put his goal too high.
Yeats
answers Moore’s challenge with these lines in "Byzantium":
"Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, / More miracle
than bird or handiwork" (Yeats The Poems
280, my italics). He seems to have assimilated Moore’s
point that nature (bird) and artifice (handiwork) are
equally of this world. Now he brings in a third register
of existence: "miracle". In the following lines,
the golden bird is contrasted with "common",
living birds, to emphasise its differing quality. Yeats
completes the poem with other images of the passage into
eternity: the "Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel
has lit", and the dolphin, on whose back the spirit
leaves for a new level of existence. He makes an effort
to create images of the unimaginable, of a visionary experience
beyond bodily existence, and to prove to Moore that there
is more to experience than the human world.
According
to Corbett, "Byzantium" "reviews the theme
of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ without adding to it" (Corbett
246). Moore had demanded an exposition of Yeats’s ideas,
and that is what he got, but an exposition on Yeats’s terms.
He does not accept Moore’s practical world-view.
Moore
does not so much fail to understand that Yeats is
asserting the possibility of discarnate experience,
as miss the tension in both Byzantium poems between
the pragmatic, accessible experience of the human
world and the spiritual. "Byzantium" and
its companion piece are as much about the fury and
the mire of human veins and the bitter complexities
that the condition involves, as they are about discarnate
experience. (Corbett 247)
A
conflict between two forces, embodied in a dialogue
or a juxtaposition of images, is the theme of
many of Yeats’s poems. "Among School Children"
contrasts age and youth, life and death, "Solomon
and the Witch" compares sexuality and spirituality.
Instead of praising one thing and condemning
the other, Yeats does not let himself get away
with anything that easy. He weaves a complex
pattern out of the contrasting subjects, which
turn out to complement each other. Denis Donoghue
writes of Yeats:
…
Yeats delights in conflict, because it is a mode of
power. His imagination loves to cause trouble, starting
quarrels between one value and another.
…
If
we select a value and say it is dear to Yeats, we
may be right, but only if we allow equal recognition
to the opposite. There are indeed official preferences,
but Yeats values above all the energy of conflict.
His mind needs two terms, one hardly less compelling
than the other: action and knowledge, essence and
existence, power and wisdom, imagination and will,
life and word, personality and character, drama and
picture, vision and reality. Any one of these
may engage his feeling, but the feeling longs to touch
its opposite, the pairs are entertained for the energy
they engender, the energy they release. (Donoghue,
Yeats, Glasgow 1971; quote Timm 147; my italics)
The
Byzantine poems seem to contrast nature and
the artificial to begin with, but as the philosophical
background of the imagery is unravelled, three
steps of transition appear in the poems’ narratives.
As the speaker or the soul moves on, he passes
through these levels in different shapes,
among which the bird is an outstanding image.
Yeats seems to follow one form of Gnosticism,
according to which "the material world
was evil, and the only business of the devotee
was to escape from it" (Hough 14). However,
in other Gnostic traditions, and particularly
in the Cabala, which he also must have acquainted
himself with during his time with the Theosophists,
God is equally present on all levels of existence.
A certain level of knowledge, gnosis,
is required to recognise this.
The
visible stages of existence, which the spirit passes through
in the Byzantine poems, can be compiled to three levels,
namely the organic world, the artifice, and the spiritual.
Every stage has its own symbols and contrasting images,
intricately woven together as the speaker or the spirit
continues its pilgrimage through the stages in different
shapes.
In
"Sailing to Byzantium", the country of "those
dying generations", in "Byzantium", "the
fury and the mire of human veins" – the organic world
– is filled with excitement and pain in equal measures.
Calm spiritual contemplation is out of the question. Nevertheless,
as we have seen, nature is not without attraction, and
it permeates the poems even as they move on towards the
eternal. Yeats was never that blind with idealism that
he believed it could be possible to deny the world completely.
His experiences among the Theosophists had acquainted
him with Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, which aim towards
the liberation of man from the circle of pain, death and
rebirth. But Yeats did not adopt the rejection of the
world (the Sanskrit word maya signifies "illusion"
and is used as a name for the material world in Hinduism
and Buddhism).
2.
The work of the artist.
The
artist (or "artificer") has an important task,
maybe the most important there is to man: he is striving
to establish a contact with the spiritual, while still
remaining with one foot in the mortal world and using
worldly tools and materials. His mission can be compared
to that of the occultist medium, who uses his or her body
and voice as vessels for the spirits of ancient sages,
and conveys their messages to the ears of the living.
On the other hand, the artist is in a difficult position.
Physically, he exists in the organic world, and true spiritual
existence is unattainable for him as long as he goes on
living there. However, if he would die and move on, he
would lose the means of conveying his experiences of the
spiritual – however limited they may be — to other mortals.
Through Yeats’s studies of the occult teachings he found
a symbolic language that fitted his conception of the
right "tools" to make the spiritual obtainable
for his audience. His use of certain images was always
based on this or some other rich tradition, never haphazard
and random. Therefore, the bird is important. It is a
mechanical object of artistic quality, created by "artificers"
to be beautiful and to sing of once and future events,
but it is also an artist by itself, as it tells stories
and expresses emotions.
3.
The spiritual.
The
artist strives to reach the spiritual level of existence
while still trapped in the material body, and his art
seeks to capture the essence of the divine for human eyes
and ears to behold. But what is this uppermost level of
existence?
Yeats
was accused by a critic of setting his ideals on an impossibly
high level and to endlessly strive towards them in his
work, painfully aware of their unobtainable character
(T. Sturge Moore, quote Corbett 245). On the other hand,
maybe he conceived the road towards the ideal a goal in
itself. Throughout "Byzantium", there is a restless
movement towards something new, which is much more diffused
in the preceding poem and concealed by the polarisation
of the country of the young on one hand and Byzantium
on the other. The spirits that roam the streets of "Byzantium"
pass through the fire and past the golden bird in the
Emperor’s palace, they ride on the backs of dolphins into
the sea, and still there is no immediate goal in sight.
Yeats rejects the Far Eastern doctrine of turning one’s
back on the world to obtain liberation from existence.
He does not want to leave the cycle, but lives for the
pilgrimage.
The
final sense of the second poem is that to espouse
[the pragmatic, accessible experience of the] human
world is to consign oneself to a tightly circumscribed
torture, and that the search for an ultimate register
of experience offers us a way to avoid that fate.
(Corbett 247)
The
problem of the artist, stuck in his earthly body, trying
to reach the infinite in his visions through his imperfect
art, lies close to Yeats’s heart. Throughout his work,
he continues to struggle with it, the artist appearing
sometimes as a dancer or a studying scholar, the work
of art often the dance, sometimes an ancient Japanese
sword, sometimes a singing-bird made of gold. Myths and
symbols were for Yeats the key to an interpretation of
the history of mankind, where ways out of its cyclical
course, "the fury and the mire of human veins",
seemed possible to find. The interpretation of symbols
that he discovered in the different esoteric doctrines
helped him create his essentially own philosophy.
To
replace the superficial reading of nature-versus-artifice
in the Byzantine poems by superimposing a system of three
levels, a passage from nature through art towards the spiritual,
does not mean that the former reading is discarded. The
contrast between "common bird or petal" and the
"miracle, bird, or golden handiwork" is seriously
intended. As Donoghue states, Yeats finds his most compelling
themes in the struggles of stark opposites, but does not
necessarily prefer one before the other. As his correspondence
with T. Sturge Moore reveals, Yeats believes in the striving
for the unattainable. The artist and his creation, the golden
bird, symbolises his problematic position between opposites,
between nature and art, time and eternity, life and immortality,
and his ambition to unite the opposites as a mediator (or
a medium, who lends her voice to spirits of the dead, who
sing "of what is past, or passing, or to come"
to living ears).
In
the foreword to his edition of William Blake, Yeats himself
brings this core of his philosophy to a point:
In
Imagination only we find a Human Faculty that touches
nature at one side, and spirit on the other. Imagination
may be described as that which is sent bringing spirit
to nature, entering into nature, and seemingly losing
its spirit, that nature being revealed as symbol may
lose the power to delude. (Blake, William |
