Analysis of Yeats' Romanticism and Artistic Themes in Sailing to Byzantium

1. W B YEATS SAILING TO BYZANTIUM MA ENGLISH III SEM PAPER X GOVERNMENT DEGREE COLL PAONTA SAHIB, HP

2. Summary of Key Points in YeatsRomanticism A major characteristic of the Modern period (see next slide) • 18th century and Victorian Reason gt imagination • Romanticism and Modernism Imagination gt reason • Irish nationalismCeltic revival, esp. in theater (somewhat like the emphasis on the primitive) • Used a variety of myths Christian, classical, his own like Blake, private myth-making • Maud Gonnethe woman who got away • Terms antinomies, gyres • Important themes art, aging, sexuality •

3. Sailing to ByzantiumBegins with a lament about youths disregard of old people Monuments of unageing intellect. • Youthbodyold agemind. Antinomies. • The birds in the trees are real birds, unlike the metal ones see in Byzantium. • The speaker is still alive he has sailed to Byzantium (present-day Istanbul), the holy city of art, on the wings of the imagination. See line 22 a dying animal Ys condition. He merely IMAGINES leaving nature at death and entering the artifice of eternity (line 24). • The final stanza is about the same association with art that we have in Among School Children Yeats imagines the afterlife as an eternity of art or artifice. •

4. • ByzantiumNow the speaker is one of the initiated, watching souls arrive therefore, this poem is about the speaker in the afterlife. • Stanzas 1 and 2 the physical world is being left behind 1 sets the scene 2 introduces a spirit in Byzantium. • Stanza 3 the golden bird represents a poem (it sings, as do Ys poems) eternal reality that transcends cycles of reincarnation.

5. • Stanzas 3 4 give details of the dancing place. • Stanza 4 gives purgatorial flames. • Stanza 5 spirits begin a dance, and dancing signals Unity of Being (of body and soul). All thought becomes an image, and the soul / Becomes a body (15th phase of the moon).

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