Explore the ways in which Yeats presents his journey in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’

Yeats wrote of Byzantium, “I symbolise the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city”[1], and indeed, his poem reflects this quest for some form of religion. From a foundation in Christianity, through “singing schools” and “holy fire”, to a final resting place on a “golden bough”, Yeats travels outside time and place, reaching his salvation from the tortuous question of the spiritual at the close of the poem. He breaks the cycles of mortality, breaks with orthodox religion, and ultimately attains transcendence.

In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Yeats journeys away from conventional religion, as he searches for the path to freedom from the struggles of existence. Traditional symbols of Christianity are recrafted, taking on new significance in this voyage, and the orthodox is dismissed as self-congratulatory and materialistic. The second stanza sees Yeats arguing, “Nor is there singing school but studying/Monuments of its own magnificence”. Religion is caught up in its own beautiful shrines; the ‘monuments’ here have replaced those of “unageing intellect” in the first stanza, and the poet scorns this fascination with materialism. Instead of teaching souls to ‘sing’ (music being metonymical for transcendence), Christianity teaches an obsession with idolatry. The poet belittles the very creation story lauded by these orthodox theologies, and reworks all that they stand for. “Fish, flesh or fowl commend all summer long/Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.”: in two, short, simple, tricolons, Yeats covers the genesis of the world and all its life. The biblical language, most obvious in ‘begotten’, and the metonyms ‘flesh’ and ‘fowl’, narrate the tale of existence from beginning to end. Living has effectively been nihilistically reduced to six words. Yeats’ poem, ‘The Second Coming’, sees Christian symbols abused in much the same way. The baptism of infants, a process of cleansing and metaphorical rebirth, is distorted, as “the ceremony of innocence is drowned”. Life, paradoxically and bluntly, linked to death. Similarly in ‘The Second Coming’, is the proto-apocalyptic perversion of Christianity’s Genesis flood. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed” – what was originally designed to purify the planet of evil, and grant Earth a new start, is tainted. Crucially also in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is Yeats’ re-characterisation of heaven. It becomes an “artifice of eternity”, ‘artifice’ carrying an implication the poet is uncertain as to whether nirvana is simply an irreality of his mind, a plastic paradise, or attainable freedom. Subverting salvation is a theme of Yeats’ works, most obvious in ‘The Cold Heaven’, where paradise becomes “the cold and rook-delighting heaven”. Here, the poet creates a noun-verb neologism, implying his nirvana is so alien it can only be described in terms of its own language. The fact it appeals to traditional harbingers of doom, rooks, disquietens the stereotypical image of a place of comfort usually found in a heaven. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ makes “God’s holy fire” emblematic of paradise, as Yeats takes even the name of Christian God and remoulds it into his own symbology. He asserts that “in the condition of fire is all music and all rest”[2], believes that the soul will finally learn to ‘sing’, to escape, once it has been purified by the “holy fire” of his imagined God.

[1] [cited in] Jeffares, A. A commentary on the collected poems of W.B. Yeats. (1968). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. (p.254)

[2] Yeats, W, Per amica silentia lunae. (1918). London: Macmillan. (p.77)