Sailing to Byzantium

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1928

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The City

Yeats employs the city as the antidote to nature. At first glance, this directly contradicts the typical stance of Modernists who preferred lines of flight away from the hustle and bustle of the wasteland of the metropolis. And yet, Byzantium is not just one city amongst others. For Yeats, it is the city of God—the holiest and most universal of cities, as it was a place in which artistry could prosper, as evidenced by Byzantium’s grandiose mosaics. Yeats believed that art was the pinnacle of human activity, which brings mortality closer to immortality. Byzantium, as a place of art, is outside of nature in an almost transcendent realm. In his essay, “Dove or Swan,” Yeats identified Byzantium as occupying the 15th phase of the Great Wheel, a time of absolute unity between the profane and the sacred: “I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religions, aesthetic and practical life were one, that architect and artifices […] spoke to the multitude and the few alike” (p. 279).

Yeats’s decision to mythologize Byzantium reveals a strong Christian influence in his poetics. The city was a significant locus of Christianity, which was the legal religion of the state. The laudable position in which he places Byzantium is used as a foil to the modern metropolis. Yeats implicitly compares Byzantium to the sprawling metropolises of his time in order to emphasize that modernity is leading to an apocalyptic moment on the Great Wheel.

Clothing and Materialism

Yeats’s fixation on clothing in multiple poems is likely due to the rise of fashion as both an industry and an art; during his lifetime, clothing became an emblem of status and vulgar materialism. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the speaker wishes to prioritize idealism over materialism, despite the fact that they are wholly intertwined in a dialectic comparable to clothing covering a body, just as the body clothes the soul. The redundancy of “perne in a gyre” (Line 19) is peculiar. The speaker demands the sages emerge from “God’s holy fire” (Line 17) and gyrate within a spiral. “Perne,” however, is a verb describing a gyrating motion which puns on the word “burn,” thus connecting “perne” to God’s holy fire. “Gyre” is typically a verb relating to whirling or gyrating motions, but in this context, it is a noun referring to a spiral or vortex. This description harkens to the idea of the body as degenerative clothing for the soul, extending this line of thought into Yeats’s conception of history as a gyre—or series of circular patterns—which chip away at the protective layers of corporeality, only to reveal the soul upon dying. If the fiery, gyrating sages are to consume the deepest desires of the speaker’s vexed heart, they must do their best to create timeless art and abstain from that which is fashionable.

Gold and Alchemy

Typically, gold functions as a synecdoche—when a part of something stands in for the whole—for class relations, but Yeats’s symbolist inclination makes for a much more complex motif. First, Yeats evokes the occult practice of alchemy—the art of fashioning a material into gold, a substance that is valuable because of its scarcity and because it is long-lasting. Artistry is on par with alchemy–it transforms the brazen into something golden.

Like an alchemist, Yeats transforms life into art in the same vein as Sir Philip Sidney—a renowned poet of the Renaissance known for “The Defence of Poesy,” where he establishes a binary between the brazen and the golden. Traditionally, the liberal arts were defined by a concern for nature, which held a dictatorial position, such that art became merely a mirror for the world. Sidney reverses this binary in his treatise, arguing that the poet is god-like. Nature may have its own agenda, but poets have the zodiac of their own wit, an imaginative landscape which they can use to better the world through art. Yeats updates Sidney’s humanistic position with the grit and pessimism necessitated by the modern world.