Yeats: A ‘Perfect’ Poem
Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Thinking of writing a new letter, I pondered on whom to write about. With a sense of shock, I realized that I had not written extensively about William Butler Yeats, the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century. Yes, yes, I know: “greatest” is not a term to be bandied about, especially since other poets were more dominant (Eliot) or more influential (Williams) or more ‘modern, (pick any of half a dozen). But he sure could write verse and, more, it sticks, sticks in the mind like no one else in relatively recent times
I have long discussions with my friend Dan about my sense that Yeats was not sufficiently ‘modern.’ Dan insists on emphasizing Yeats’s themes, and how his sense of a modern diminished-ness marks his sensibility out as ‘modern.’ In response, I counter that a kind of experimentation with style and form connote modernism, and those were not sufficiently present in Yeats. I am not a formalist by any means, but cultural crisis should mark art, not just the things it ‘talks about.’ “Make it new,” Era Pound famously said. I hold to that. (Although, truth be told, Pound moved in with Yeats, counseled him, made his poetry ‘modern.’ I often think on that: The most accomplished, most famous, English language poet saying to wild red-haired budding and not yet reputable poet, ‘Sure, come join me, show me how to write poems better.’ That Yeats!)
(And I have written about Yeats before, but that was in a letter with two subjects, Mallarmé and Yeats.)
Yeats it shall be. I often introduced a modern poetry course by looking closely at a poem that works as wonderfully as a poem can work, “Sailing to Byzantium.” We’ll look at that poem in a moment, a poem in which Yeats, in early middle age, resents that time passes and in passing destroys everything – except art. He declares himself a devotee of art, of “monuments of unageing intellect.”
“Sailing to Byzantium” is a ‘perfect’ poem, and thus subjects itself to analysis perfectly. I admire the poem greatly but don’t love it. Thus, in a succeeding letter I will discuss a late Yeats poem with a somewhat similar theme which I do love, “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz.”
Let’s begin with a very brief, late Yeats poem, the succinct but revelatory “The Spur.” It is not a hard poem, a quatrain about how he responds to aging, about how in search of energy and life he resorts to the stimulants of lust and rage. Notice, you who think that poetry must be ‘modern,’ that Yeats is writing here in rhymed couplets:
The Spur
You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song?
The poet knows that we expect the aged to subside into wisdom, into loving benevolence. Why, then does he frustrate us – that “horrible” leaps from the page -- to acknowledge that only sex and anger can compel him, now that he is old, to sing. How, how, “horrible.”
From his earliest poems, Yeats was angry at time. In what I might call his middle period, he wrote the perfect poem which is before us, “Sailing to Byzantium.” If you pay attention, you see that the poem is more about time than about art, more about sex and anger than about the perfect world to which he, as a poet, aspires.
Let’s look at the poem, line by line, stanza by stanza.
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
It is stunning, that first line: “That is not country for old men.” The referent for “that” – in reading it aloud, there is a strong stress on the first word, that “That” – is Ireland, the country the speaker has left behind as he sails for Byzantium. Ireland is a country to which he, middle-aged but conceiving himself as old, does not belong. So much sex! Young people in one another’s arms, embracing, making love. Birds singing to attract a mate, with whom they will couple and beget young birds. The salmon pressing upriver, to spawn; the seas full of mackerel, rising to the surface to feed: All of creation is full of life and the procreation of life. “Whatever is begotten [ah, sex!], born and dies.”
All is “caught in that sensual music.” The music always ends: “those dying generations,” he says of the melodiously singing birds; all that is begotten “dies.” And he, the speaker of the poem, is caught in the cycle of time, which though it begins in sex and birth, always ends with death. Those caught up in time – the loving and sexual young, the birds singing to attract a mate, the fish and flesh and fowl – and we have them all, salmon/mackerel, young people, birds – all live in a ‘summer” world where fecundity is forever, and death seems on such a distant horizon that it does not enter into consciousness. (One would not be wrong to hear an echo of Aesop’s fable, later famously recounted by La Fontaine, “The Grasshopper and the Ant.” The grasshopper sings the summer long, while the ant frugally tucks away what will sustain him in the harsh winter to come.) Those salmon seem an augury – they are swimming upstream to lay eggs, but their swimming will result in their death as well. They lay their eggs and then expire.
Being born means having to die. Yet for Yeats there is an ‘out’ from this world of time and destruction, an ‘out’ which “all neglect[:] Monuments of unageing intellect.” ‘Ars longa, vita brevis,’, the ancients used to say: Life is short, and art is long. Art is our retreat from the world of time, of change, of (ultimately) death and endings. Hmmm.
But is it? Would you, the reader, rather be “the young/In one another’s arms” or a “monument of unageing intellect”? Out of time, yes, but as a substitute for emotion, intellect falls, I think, short. The insufficiency of art, of the intellectual construct – though Yeats will praise art and see it as a refuge from the world of time, especially in the next stanza – undergirds this poem, even though it seems to say that in the face of time’s ravages, art suffices. In other words, the poem is supremely ironic, seeming to say one thing, but meaning another. Yeats manages to have it both ways, both art and love/death. This is rather spectacular, even though many readers see the poem as un-ironic, as a praise of art and the escape from time.
We are all caught in that “sensual music” of being “born, begotten, die[ing].” Passion and love are of this world, but so is destruction, the ruination caused by living in time. All fades except those “Monuments of unageing intellect.”
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
The second stanza hammers home this ‘message.’ I think Yeats is channeling Shakespeare in those opening lines – “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick...” [“When ‘a was naked, he was, for all/ the world, like fork’d radish” from Henry IV, Part Two, 3, 2; “here I stand, your slave/ A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man,” from King Lear, 3, 2. ] Let us not rush on too quickly: This is a stunning image, perhaps the best I know of the precarious smallness and meaninglessness of human life and its unfortunate duration through time.
Yeats adds, of course, a proviso: “Unless.” We can always make art, make something which outlasts us and praises the existence we have had. [“We must laugh and we must sing,/ We are blest by everything,/ Everything we look upon is blest,” Yeats concluded his poem “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.” That is a very, very different posture than the poet adopts in this poem; still, the endurance of art, of singing, characterizes both poems.] “Unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/For every tatter in its mortal dress.” We can dress ourselves up, can let our souls garb themselves in magnificence, if we sing – for art outlasts time and disintegration.
So, the poet tells us, he is sailing to Byzantium to study “monuments of its own magnificence,” monuments which show how the soul has clad itself in the vestments of lasting beauty: There, the traditions of art were grafted on the temporal and failing body. Scholars agree that he was thinking of Ravenna, where mosaics in a number of churches attested to the glory that comes when art makes the temporal into something greater and more lasting. To see those images, type ‘Ravenna mosaics’ into Google and hit ‘Images. [I have visited Ravenna, and Yeats has much going for his argument: The mosaics are one of the supreme achievements of human civilization.] So in the poem he goes to Byzantium to study how to turn life into song, into “monuments of unageing intellect.” Ravenna and those monuments are the “school” he shall learn in.
It is at this point that we return to the title, “Sailing to Byzantium.” It is not, ’Arrival at Byzantium,’ or, as in a later poem, merely ‘Byzantium.’ Voyaging, moving forward, or as the post-modern age would have it, process: Yeats, in singing of moving beyond and out of time, is very much in time. We should bear that in mind, especially when we come to the glorious final lines of the poem. But, for now, stanza three:
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
He begins the third stanza by commanding (imploring?) the saints lined up, from their background of golden tesserae (individual pieces of a mosaic), to spin (‘perne’) in a vortex (‘gyre’), so that they come forward from the wall to him, to teach him the secret of art. They will be “the singing-masters of my soul.” They will teach him how art masters both desire and time (that ‘dying animal’) so the soul can survive outside of time, into “eternity.” Note that, for Yeats, here, eternity is constructed, built, made through craft: it is an ‘artifice.”
This is a lot of fancy imagery for a seemingly simple request: Teach me how to leave this old body behind (which was the subject of stanza one) and move into a work of art that, carefully constructed, will outlast the time which is consuming me. Thus, Yeats hopes, the body can move forward toward eternal life: He will be endlessly ‘sailing to Byzantium.’ Desire and death can be evaded through art and artistry.
The final stanza is about this movement out of life and into art.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
No more body. Remember stanza one, where the young and birds and fowl were all wrapped up in love and desire, embracing time and unfortunately also dooming themselves to dying? Here Yeats steps “outside of nature” and attempts to become what he is creating, a work of art.
I warned you that the poem is ironic. “Once out of nature I shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing.” So what does he do? He becomes a bird. Last I heard, birds were natural things…. That is the first irony.
He will become a beautiful, bejeweled ‘artifice-ial’ thing, an artifice devised by craft to endure as the natural world – “begotten, born, and dies” – does not. Now, pay attention. Another fable is being referred to here, more directly than the grasshopper and the ant were, previously. Hans Christian Andersen wrote in his famous fairy tale, “The Nightingale,” of a wondrously constructed mechanical bird which supplanted a ‘real’ bird.’ Yet, in time, the mechanical bird wore down and could no longer make music – while the real nightingale sang for the king and by singing brought him back to health. The moral? Real birds perform better than artificial birds, The natural is better than the artificial. Irony number two
Finally, we come to the magnificent last lines. The bird of art is “set upon a golden bough to sing/ To lords and ladies of Byzantium/ Of what is past or passing, or to come.” What? This bird, out of time, pure artifice, sings of the world that is “past, or passing, or to come.” He sings of the world of time which the poet desired to flee “into the artifice of eternity.” Art, for all of its endurance, sings of the world of the temporal which it tries to escape. But there is no escape. Time is the substance of everything. We may remark, being sharp readers, that this is the second occasion in the poem that a triple series has come before us. “Whatever is begotten, born, and dies” anticipates and mirrors that final line, “Of what is past, and passing, and to come.”
There can be, the end of the poem assures us, no getting rid of, or going beyond time. We understand now why those “monuments of unageing intellect” that we encountered in the first stanza are sort of sterile compared to “The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas.” Yeats wants escape from “the young/in one another’s arms,” but that longing for escape, that ‘desire,’ is because he is firmly embedded in time, time that is leaching away his ability to satisfy his desires.
Let me step back into my own history. We can learn from poems about the world and about the lives we have to live, but we can also learn from poems about the very poems we are reading. This latter kind of learning is a product, I think, of attentiveness – we can and should pay close attention to what we are reading. A phrase I am very fond of, and which I have cited before, comes from a long and complex book, S/Z, by Roland Barthes. It is a very good book, a minutely close, sentence by sentence, analysis of a story by Balzac. I found it deeply enlightening, but don’t recommend it, as it is almost impossibly dense. But as he goes along, Barthes offers this: “Those who refuse to reread are doomed to read the same text, everywhere.” I think this is true. If we do not reread, if we do not pay attention to what the words try to tell us, we only see what we have determined, in advance, the text will say. We lay our understanding of the world over the text and its specific language, and lo-and-behold the text tells us what we have brought to it.
So it was with this poem, and so it remained for many years. I read the poem, first, when I was in my early twenties, an undergraduate in college, and it seemed to me to uphold the old maxim I quoted earlier, that life is short and art is long, that art endures when mortal beings do not, that art can triumph over time and death.
In later years, teaching the poem, I found myself calling attention to that strange ‘irony’ in the final stanza, that in putting forward the mechanical nightingale as superior to the ‘real’ nightingale (when in the story it was not!), Yeats was undermining his argument that the work of art could be triumphant over time.
But I did not realize how this ironic counter-narrative runs through the entire poem. I was willfully blind to the multiple ironies in the poem. (Confession: I am a sucker for reading poems and stories ‘straight,’ reluctant to acknowledge that irony exists in the use of language. So my own constitutional blindness pre-determined how I would read the poem. Wanting to see art as triumphant over time, I saw the poem as proclaiming that ‘truth.’)
That’s the thing about irony: It lets us have it both ways. In this poem, for instance, Yeats makes a strong claim that art triumphs over time and dissolution and death. But he also makes a counterclaim, that the existence we live is lived in time, and with desire, and that the pull of this existence is so strong that even art cannot escape it. “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies,” Faulkner once said in an interview about the primacy of art over individual human beings. But in this poem, Yeats tells us that view is, while credible, wrong: Fucking is better than statues. Desire, movement toward what we want, is regnant in a world in which we know that “whatever is begotten, born and dies.” Desire is not only the ‘stuff’ of poems, it is the ‘stuff’ in poems.
For in this poem we are, in fact, “sailing to Byzantium.” We are not there, but moving there, desiring the fulness and quietude of art. Desiring eternity, while we are by our very existences doomed to live in a world of time.
I wrote at the outset that this poem is sort of perfect. The birds introduced in the first stanza return in the last stanza. The “song” in the first stanza recurs in every stanza: “sing” appears three times in stanza two, once in stanza three, and once in stanza four (where singing is the subject of the stanza). “Seas” appears in stanza one as the place where fish live, and in stanza two as the venue where his journey is taking place. “Those dying generations” die in stanza one, and the “dying” recurs in stanza three. The made thing, the work of art – “monuments” in stanzas one and two, “artifice” in stanza three, “hammered gold and gold enamelling” in the final stanza – appears throughout, one of the poles that structure the poem. As does its opposite, the teeming life of the first stanza, the “mortal” and “tattered” body of the second, the “dying animal’ of the third, the hoped-for escape from the “bodily” in that final stanza. Oh, and that wonderful, wonderful echo: “Whatever is begotten, born and dies” returns as the “of what is past, or passing, or to come” that ends the poem.
Still, the poem, wondrous, is too perfect for me. Too refined, too ironic I suppose. I prefer a late poem, “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz.” Messier, both more nostalgic and more rhetorical, than “Sailing to Byzantium.” It tugs at my heart in a way this perfect poem does not. That poem, then, will be the subject of my next letter. But in writing that letter, I found a historical density that undermines my love for the poem. We learn as we keep living – none of our knowledge is final. So: stay tuned.