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Essay on Byzantium
The poem, “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats, is an in-depth look at the journeys of one man seeking to escape the idle and uneducated society of Europe. Yeats pursues a society of which sensual and artistic domains reign. The goal of the author is to become a part of Byzantine civilization and to be forever immortalized in the artwork presented in gold on the walls of the Byzantine churches.
Byzantium plays a major role in two mature poems by Irish writer William Butler Yeats (1865–1939): “Sailing to Byzantium” (1926) and “Byzantium” (1930). Though Yeats never visited Istanbul, when traveling through Italy he did see Byzantine church mosaics in Ravenna and Sicily. It is probably from these experiences that the idea of using Byzantium as a symbolic contrast to the Ireland of his day (which he refers to as “no country for old men” in the earlier of the two poems) came to him (Jonathan, 2002). The title “Sailing to Byzantium” refers to the imaginary journey the speaker longs to take to escape the juvenile and unappreciative inhabitants which populate the country he currently resides in.
Writing of “Sailing to Byzantium”, Yeats noted that ‘When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells and making the jeweled crosiers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city’. From Yeats’ letters and prose commentaries, we know that he viewed Byzantium as a sort of heavenly realm which, through its art and architecture, will last eternally (Jonathan, 2002).
As Yeats himself puts it, Byzantium was a place where ‘religious, aesthetic and practical life were one’, a place where artists and craftsmen ‘spoke to the multitude and the few alike’.................
