Neil Bowen on
Extract from a student essay on Yeats' poem that scored full marks for coursework.
Discuss Yeats’ portrayal of the mortal and immortal worlds in the poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, and how far and in what ways this is characteristic of Yeats’ poetry.
Predominant in Yeats’ early work are themes of Celtic folklore, Irish nationalism and Romanticism. By contrast, his later poetry shifts in emphasis, reflecting the influences both of nascent modernism and personal disillusionment. In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, the first poem in the collection The Tower (1928), characteristic themes of fate and mortality are prominent, alongside the motif of escape which occurs throughout his poetry. Frequently, Yeats’ sanctuaries are either unattainable, or are revealed to be misleading in some sense – such is true of Byzantium in this poem. Ostensibly, the speaker wants nothing more than to escape from the mortal world to immortal Byzantium; closer analysis reveals subtle ambiguities which complicate this impression.
Opposites underpin the poem, reflecting the dichotomy between the mortal world and Byzantium, as well as Yeats’ own internal conflict. Form manifests this – two balanced stanzas of ottava rima devoted to each ‘world’ – as does the pattern of binary contrasts such as ‘drowsy’ and ‘awake’, and ‘young’ and ‘old’. That the soul sings for the tatters in ‘its mortal dress’ indicates a separation between body and soul analogous to that between the mortal world and eternal Byzantium. Similarly, the first sentence, an almost theatrical rejection of the world of the young – largely monosyllabic and with an emphatic caesura – demonstrates the poet’s perceived distance from the mortal world through the choice of the demonstrative ‘that’.
Mortal and immortal are further separated through language. The first stanza with its invocation of the vibrant, fecund natural world – ‘birds’, ‘salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas’ where the hyphenated words reinforce an idea of crowded animation – opposes the constructed world of Byzantium, in which a ‘natural thing’ is spurned in favour of the craft of ‘Grecian goldsmiths’. Likewise, the apostrophe ‘O sages’ in the third stanza marks a shift in lexical field to more classical, spiritual resonances – for example, ‘God’ in the first line, and the repetition of ‘holy fire’ with its connotations of purgatory and purification which are picked up in the later poem ‘Byzantium’. Such references as these manifest the evolution in Yeats’ poetry from the purely Celtic mythology of the early Celtic Twilight period, and from themes of nature to those of culture and the soul.