Byzantium

Alejandro Rubio Durán

Byzantium

William Butler Yeats is considered as one of the most important poets in English Literature. He was born in County Dublin, Ireland in 1865. He was introduced to the folktales by his mother together with his sisters. When he was a child, his father decided to move to London. During his childhood he read the works of writers such as Dante Alighieri,Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake or Percy Shelly. By the time, he started to show a devoted feeling of patriotism. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre. His plays usually treat Irish legends, but he shows his fascination for spiritualism and mysticism. By the time, he is very influenced by the Japanese Noah plays. He was awarded with the Nobel Prize and in 1922 he was appointed tothe Irish Senate. His style is static, highly poetical and esoteric. The most important works are The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), The Tower (1928) and Last Poems and Plays (1940). He died in 1939.

The poem that I choose to explain is “Byzantium”. Yeats rewrote one of his major poems “Sailing to Byzantium” three years later of its first publication. It was published in The Widing Stair and OtherPoems. The form of the poem is not very regular: the poem can be divided in five stanzas and each stanza is composed by eight lines, the first, second, third, fifth and eight lines are pentameter, the fourth line is in tetrameter and the sixth and the seventh line are in trimester, the rhyme style of the poem is AABBCDDC.

The poem talks about the city of Byzantium but it gives anothervision of the city. It set the action at night in the city. The soldiers are sleep and a shadow of a man walks through them. Then, the speaker introduces the image of a golden bird in a golden tree that sings aloud. After that, a fire appears on the emperor’s pavement and it is no feed by wood and it is not helped by the storms. Then, the spirits arrive in riding dolphins in a flood, which breaksthe emperor’s treasures of gold and finally the image of the marbles from the dance floor breaks with the image of the dolphins. In the “Sailing to Byzantium”, Yeats is in his walking to Byzantium and in the second, he arrives in the city. When came in, he finds the golden bird and the dead spirits arrives to the city, and he can see a fire in the Emperor’s pavement. Numerous reviews define thatthe poem Byzantium represents the Yeats’s arrival to Paradise. The golden bird represents the re-birth of the soul, eternity and it is related with the phoenix or the Arab bird; the arrival of the spirits from the underworld to Paradise ridding dolphins, a symbol of fortune, protection and transition; and the fire which purifies the souls. This argument and vision of the poem is explained by Yeats:“A walking mummy, flames at the street corners where the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees, in the harbour offering their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry them to Paradise.”(Norman 49)

The article chosen to analyze this poem is “The Byzantine Poems of W. B. Yeats”. The author of the article is A. Norman Jeffares and it was publishedin The Review of English Studies, Vol. 22, No. 85, pp. 44-52 by Oxford University Press in January in 1946. The article analyzes the Yeat’s poems “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium” but in that essay, we focus on the second one.

A.Normar does not uses this review to explain the different themes that the reader can find in the poem, he explains almost the figures of the poem thatappears in the lines of the entire poem. About the word “gong”, he explains that this word was taken by Yeats from the book The Age of Justinian and Theodora, so from that point, Norman is allow explaining the meanings of lines fourth and eight lines from the first stanza:

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