SAILING TO BYZANTIUM
According to yeats;
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND POLITICS
Yeats believed that art and politics were intrinsically linked and used his writing to express his attitudes toward Irish politics, as well as to educate his readers about Irish cultural history. From an early age, Yeats felt a deep connection to Ireland and his national identity, and he thought that British rule negatively impacted Irish politics and social life. His early compilation of folklore sought to teach a literary history that had been suppressed by British rule, and his early poems were odes to the beauty and mystery of the Irish countryside. As Yeats became more involved in Irish politics—through his relationships with the Irish National Theatre, the Irish Literary Society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and Maud Gonne—his poems increasingly resembled political manifestos. Yeats wrote numerous poems . Yeats believed that art could serve a political function: poems could both critique and comment on political events, as well as educate and inform a population.
Some of the symbols used in the works of Yeats are
Symbols;
The gyre, a circular or conical shape, appears frequently in Yeats’s poems and was developed as part of the philosophical system outlined in his book A Vision. At first, Yeats used the phases of the moon to articulate his belief that history was structured in terms of ages, but he later settled upon the gyre as a more useful model. He chose the image of interlocking gyres—visually represented as two intersecting conical spirals—to symbolize his philosophical belief that all things could be described in terms of cycles and patterns. Although this is a difficult concept to grasp abstractly, the image makes sense when applied to the waxing and waning of a particular historical age or the evolution of a human life from youth to adulthood to old age.
ThE SWAN
Swans are a common symbol in poetry, often used to depict idealized nature. Yeats rewrites the Greek myth of Zeus and Leda to comment on fate and historical inevitability: Zeus disguises himself as a swan to rape the unsuspecting Leda. Even though Yeats clearly states that the swan is the god Zeus, he also emphasizes the physicality of the swan: the beating wings, the dark webbed feet, the long neck and beak. Through this description of its physical characteristics, the swan becomes a violent divine force. By rendering a well-known poetic symbol as violent and terrifying rather than idealized and beautiful, Yeats manipulates poetic conventions, an act of literary modernism, and adds to the power of the poem.
THE GREAT BEAST
Yeats employs the figure of a great beast—a horrific, violent animal—to embody difficult abstract concepts. The great beast as a symbol comes from Christian iconography, in which it represents evil and darkness. In “The Second Coming,” the great beast emerges from the Spiritus Mundi, or soul of the universe, to function as the primary image of destruction in the poem. Yeats describes the onset of apocalyptic events in which the “blood-dimmed tide is loosed” and the “ceremony of innocence is drowned” as the world enters a new age and falls apart as a result of the widening of the historical gyres. Yeats modifies the well-known image of the sphinx to embody the poem’s vision of the climactic coming. By rendering the terrifying prospect of disruption and change into an easily imagined horrifying monster, Yeats makes an abstract fear become tangible and real.
Some analysis in his poem;
Yeats is the greatest poet in the history of Ireland and probably the greatest poet to write in English during the twentieth century; his themes, images, symbols, metaphors, and poetic sensibilities encompass the breadth of his personal experience, as well as his nation’s experience during one of its most troubled times. Yeats’s great poetic project was to reify his own life—his thoughts, feelings, speculations, conclusions, dreams—into poetry: to render all of himself into art, but not in a merely confessional or autobiographical manner; he was not interested in the common-place. His elaborate iconography takes elements from Irish mythology, Greek mythology, nineteenth-century occultism, English literature, Byzantine art, European politics, and Christian imagery, all wound together and informed with his own experience and interpretive understanding.
Yeats’s own experience is never far from his poems, even when they seem obscurely imagistic or theoretically abstract, and the veil of obscurity and abstraction is often lifted once one gains an understanding of how the poet’s lived experiences relate to the poem in question.
No poet of the twentieth century more persuasively imposed his personal experience onto history by way of his art; and no poet more successfully plumbed the truths contained within his “deep heart’s core,” even when they threatened to render his poetry clichéd or ridiculous. His integrity and passionate commitment to work according to his own vision protect his poems from all such accusations. But Yeats’s goal is always to arrive at personal truth; and in that sense, despite his profound individuality, he remains one of the most universal writers ever to have lived.
Rhyme Scheme and Meter in "Sailing to Byzantium"
William Butler Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” first published in 1928, wrestles with some of the most problematic binaries in philosophical thought: age and youth, mortality and immortality, transience and permanence, artifice and nature. One of the great Modern poets, Yeats used a variety of rhyme schemes and meters in his vast body of work, but he settled on ottavarima in iambic pentameter for “Sailing to Byzantium.”
Influences;
Yeats wasn’t the first poet to come up with ottavarima; it has Italian roots, and several prominent English writers had used it since Edward Fairfax introduced it to England in his translation of an Italian poem. For instance, Lord George Gordon Byron famously used ottavarima in “Don Juan,” and Percy Shelley wrote in the form in “The Witch of Atlas” and “The Zucca,” among other poems. By choosing ottavarima for his works, Yeats announces his connection with the literary past, and he introduces the form to the Modern era as an appropriate vehicle for serious subject matter.
Iambic Pentameter;
“Sailing to Byzantium” is written in a meter called iambic pentameter. Each line in this form uses the iambic “foot” -- one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable -- five times, for a pattern of 10 syllables that alternate between unstressed and stressed. For example, the second stanza’s first line uses perfect iambic pentameter: “An AG-ed MAN is BUT a PAL-try THING,” where capital letters indicate a stressed syllable. Iambic pentameter, like ottavarima, helps establish the elevated tone of “Sailing to Byzantium,” since historically the meter has been used for poems that deal with weighty subject matter, such as philosophy or the sacred.
Metrical Departures;
Although poems are defined by the meter they use most, few poems adhere perfectly to a meter throughout. “Sailing to Byzantium” departs from the iambic pentameter form in several places. In this reading, there’s a trochaic substitution in the first foot, a spondaic substitution in the second foot, a pyrrhic substitution in the third foot, and another spondaic substitution in the fourth foot. The iambic form initiates with the last foot in the line, “The YOUNG,” and recovers in the second line of the poem: “In ONE an-OTH-er’s ARMS, BIRDS in the TREES.” This second line has only one substitution, a trochee in the fourth foot.
By Elder Olson
In "Sailing to Byzantium" an old man faces the problem of old age, of death, and of regeneration, and gives his decision. Old age, he tells us, excludes a man from the sensual joys of youth; the world appears to belong completely to the young, it is no place for the old; indeed, an old man is scarcely a man at all—he is an empty artifice, an effigy merely, of a man; he is a tattered coat upon a stick. This would be very bad, except that the young also are excluded from something; rapt in their sensuality, they are ignorant utterly of the world of spirit. Hence, if old age frees a man from sensual passion, he may rejoice in the liberation of the soul; he is admitted to the realm of the spirit; and his rejoicing will increase according as he realizes the magnificence of the soul. But the soul can best learn its own greatness from great works of art; hence he turns to those great works, but in turning to them, he finds that these are by no means mere effigies, or monuments, but things which have souls also. . . he wishes reincarnation, not now in a mortal body, but in the immortal and changeless embodiment of art.
By
Sreeka
