The Aesthetical Logic of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium”

Abstract

William Butler Yeats’s interest in Byzantium art and civilization began in the nineties and continued through his life. Yeats probably saw the mosaic work at Ravena when in 1907 he travelled in Italy with Lady Gragory. Yeats read several books about Byzantine art and civilization and Byzantine mosaic in Rome and Sicily. Once Byzantium had found a place in “the System,” it shortly appeared in the poetry, first in “Sailing to Byzantium,” then changed, though not utterly, in “Byzantium.” Besides, in this later Byzantium Unity of Being is threatened, though it is miraculously restored when the symbolic dolphins carry the souls of the dead to a Yeatsean paradise, a paradise of art, art which is at once sensual and spiritual. Some critic examined the symbolic unity of Yeats’s Byzantium poems, and demonstrated how the poems structurally and thematically rely on dialectical pattern. Also, I found that the general thesis, antithesis, and synthesis pattern of “Sailing to Byzantium.” In “Byzantium” the general of this pattern, which remained basically the same, becomes more sharply dialectical.