Byzantium a poem

by William Butler Yeats

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,

More miraclc than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the star-lit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,

Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood.
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea

SUMMARY

This is pretty much a wildly disorienting poem. If the speaker for the two Byzantium
poems is the same, the question is, how did we get from “sages standing in God's
holy fire” in the first poem to a courtyard filled with “blood-begotten spirits” in the
second? It looks like the speaker reached Byzantium and found it vastly different
than he'd imagined. He isn't redeemed from old age; he's transformed into a bodiless
observer of the weird happenings in the city. He is passive and entranced by
the arcane energy around him.

The speaker isn't having much of an impact on his world and he's not introducing
any order to it. There's very little order, period--the Emperor of Byzantium never
physically appears, and his agents are less than imposing (“the Emperor's drunken
soldiery are abed,” line 2). Who is ruling the roost in this world? The "shade,"
the“blood-begotten spirits”, or maybe the golden bird in stanza 3?
In "Sailing," the bird was the speaker's ideal self: a beautiful and permanent piece of
interactive art that could predict the future. But now the bird is immobile on its perch
and shows a disdain, bordering on hatred, for living things, those "complexities of
mire and blood". The speaker was once intent on leaving a sensual world filled with
reveling youths who ignored the wisdom of senior citizens, but he supposed that he
was leaving his young country for an eternal paradise. Though it's true that age and
entropy can't intrude upon Byzantium, neither is there any possibility of growth or
change.

The most disturbing aspect of this whole poem is the fact that the speaker does not
even seem to notice that everything surrounding him is inescapably wrong. From
what little information is given, he seems content. But although the speaker doesn't
feel his own plight, the reader gets a strong sense that Byzantium is a place where
individuals can be trapped by the supernatural and fall into “an agony of trance” until
there is no hope and no thought of breaking free.

Or that's my take on it.

Major Themes

The source of several major themes in “Sailing to Byzantium” can be found in Yeats's
1925 work, A Vision (1925), in which he develops his cyclical theory of life, based in
part on Yeats's understanding of the Hegelian dialectic and his reading of Blake's
prophetic poetry. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats used the concept of the spiraling
gyre to suggest that opposite concepts—such as youth and age, body and soul,
nature and art, transient and eternal—are in fact mutually dependent upon each
other. Yoked together by the gyre and the poem itself, the mutually interpenetrating
opposites—thesis and antithesis—resolve in such a way as to produce a synthesis
that contains a larger truth. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the golden bird contains
elements of transitory nature—namely, its music—with the transcendent qualities of
timeless art.

The tension between art and life is an essential dichotomy in Yeats's poetry. Yeats
envisioned the artist as a kind of alchemist, whose transformative art obscures the
distinction between “the dancer and the dance,” as he wrote in the poem, “Among
School Children.” For Yeats, only through imagination could the raw materials of life
be transformed into something enduring. Thus “Sailing to Byzantium” has at least
two symbolic readings, both mutually interdependent upon the other. The poem is
both about the journey taken by the speaker's soul around the time of death and the
process by which, through his art, the artist transcends his own mortality.

An important symbol in “Sailing to Byzantium” is the ancient city of Byzantium,

which in the fifth and sixth centuries was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire
and the center of art and architecture. Byzantine art did not attempt to represent
human forms, and so, for Yeats, Byzantium symbolized a way of life in which art is
celebrated as artifice. Furthermore, Byzantium represents what Yeats, in A Vision,
calls “Unity of Being,” in which “religious, aesthetic and practical life were one” and
art represented “the vision of a whole people.”

Plot and Main Characters

“Sailing to Byzantium,” a lyric poem, has neither conventional characters nor plot.
The poem consists of four open-form stanzas and features a speaker who may be
thought of, as Richard Ellmann suggests, as “a symbol of Yeats and of the artist and
of man.” The action of the poem concerns the problem of immersing oneself in life
and at the same time striving for permanence. The opening stanza describes a state
of youth, a sensuous, sometimes violent, life with emphasis on productivity and
regeneration (“That is no country for old men”), and then contrasts this sensuality
with the intellectual and the transitory with the permanent: “Caught in that sensual
music all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.”
Acknowledging both his mortality and desire for transcendence, the speaker prepares
his soul for the body's death by “studying / Monuments of its own magnificence” and
“sail[s] the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” In Byzantium, the
speaker hopes to fuse the “sensual music” with the “monuments,” that is, the
passing pleasures with transcendent art. In 1931, Yeats wrote that he chose to
“symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city” because
“Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual
philosophy.” In Byzantium, the speaker encounters a world of timeless art and
spirituality, represented by sages and “God's holy fire” with flames and smoke
twisting like a “perne in a gyre,” an allusion to Yeats's cyclical theory of history and
transcendence. The speaker wishes to lose his heart, “sick with desire / And fastened
to a dying animal,” and have his soul gathered “into the artifice of eternity” so that
“Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing.” In
the last stanza, the speaker imagines himself transformed into a work of art that
transcends the passing of time, a Byzantine work of art, a golden bird that is
animate in that it sings to the Emperor, but inanimate as a work of art that will
survive generations.

Rhyming scheme

Alliteration
Repetition of consonant sounds

Line 4: The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Line 5: Fish, flesh, or fowl,

Apostrophe
Addressing an abstraction or a thing, present or absent; addressing
an absent entity or person; addressing a deceased person.

Line 17: O sages standing in God's holy fire

Metaphor
Line 8: Monuments of unageing intellect.
..............Comparison of old men to monuments

Lines 9-10: An aged man is but a paltry thing,

.......................A tattered coat upon a stick,
.......................Comparison of an old man's skin to a tattered coat and his skeleton to a stick

The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABABABCC. In several of the rhymes, the
vowel sounds differ but the final consonants are the same--as in lines 18 and 20.
When the vowel sounds of rhyming words are different but their final consonants
are the same, a special kind of rhyme occurs: consonance.

Daffodils a poem
by William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they

Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee;
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company!
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

The poem 'Daffodils' is also known by the title 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', a lyrical poem
written by William Wordsworth in 1804. It was published in 1815 in 'Collected Poems' with four
stanzas. William Wordsworth is a well-known romantic poet who believed in conveying simple
and creative expressions through his poems. He had quoted, "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility". Thus, Daffodils is
one of the most popular poems of the Romantic Age, unfolding the poet's excitement, love and
praise for a field blossoming with daffodils.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

William Wordsworth was one of the major poets of his time honored as England's Poet Laureate.
He was a nature poet who helped to coin the term 'Romanticism' in English Literature along with
I.A.Richards in 1798, by the publication of 'Lyrical Ballads'. Some of the major works of William
Wordsworth are:

• Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798) - Lines Composed a Few Miles Above
Tintern Abbey, We are Seven, Simon Lee, Lines Written in Early Spring
• Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems Volume 1 (1800) - Lucy Gray, Strange Fits of Passion
Have I Known, She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
• Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) - Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Daffodils, Resolution
and Independence, Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, The World is Too Much With
Us

Daffodils or 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' Poem

William Wordsworth wrote Daffodils on a stormy day in spring, while walking along with his sister
Dorothy near Ullswater Lake, in England. He imagined that the daffodils were dancing and
invoking him to join and enjoy the breezy nature of the fields. Dorothy Wordsworth, the younger
sister of William Wordsworth, found the poem so interesting that she took 'Daffodils' as the
subject for her journal. The poem contains six lines in four stanzas, as an appreciation of
daffodils.

Analysis of Daffodils by William Wordsworth

I wander’d lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vale and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils:
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Rhyming Scheme of Daffodils

The 'Daffodils' has a rhyming scheme throughout the poem. The rhyming scheme of the above
stanza is ABAB ( A - cloud and crowd; B - hills and daffodils) and ending with a rhyming couplet
CC (C - trees and breeze). The above stanza makes use of 'Enjambment' which converts the
poem into a continuous flow of expressions without a pause.

Figures of Speech Used in Daffodils

I wander’d lonely as a cloud - The first line makes nice use of personification and simile. The poet
assumes himself to be a cloud (simile) floating in the sky. When Wordsworth says in the second
line 'I' (poet as a cloud) look down at the valleys and mountains and appreciate the daffodils; it's
the personification, where an inanimate object (cloud) possesses the quality of a human enabling
it to see the daffodils. The line "Ten thousand saw I at a glance" is an exaggeration and
a hyperbole, describing the scene of ten thousand daffodils, all together. Alliteration is the
repetition of similar sounds, is applied for the word 'h', in the words - high and hills.

Title and Theme of the Poem 'Daffodils'

The title, 'Daffodils' is a simple word that reminds us about the arrival of the spring season, when
the field is full of daffodils. Daffodils are yellow flowers, having an amazing shape and beautiful
fragrance. A bunch of daffodils symbolize the joys and happiness of life.

The theme of the poem 'Daffodils' is a collection of human emotions inspired by nature that we
may have neglected due to our busy lives. The daffodils imply rebirth, a new beginning for human
beings, blessed with the grace of nature. The arrival of daffodils in the month of March is
welcome and an enjoyable time to appreciate them!

Imagery Skill in Daffodils

The poem paints images of lakes, fields, trees, stars in Ullswater. Wordsworth continuously
praises the daffodils, comparing them to the Milky Way galaxy (in the second stanza), their dance
(in the third stanza) and in the concluding stanza, dreams to join the daffodils in their dance.

The poem uses descriptive language throughout the stanzas. The poet cannot resist himself from
participating in the dance of the daffodils. The wording is simple and melodious. Isn't Daffodils, a
great gift idea of William Wordsworth that celebrates happiness of nature amongst us?