Critically appreciate “Sailing to Byzantium” /
Consider “Sailing to Byzantium” as a quest poem.
“Sailing to
Byzantium” is one of the most remarkable poems composed by W. B. Yeats. The
poet’s own note about the poem helps us understand the central thought of the
poem. “Describe Byzantium as it is in the system towards the end of the first
Christian millennium: A walking mummy, flames at the street corners where the
soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees in the
harbour, offering their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry them to
paradise”.
The first stanza of the poem gives an account of a midnight in the city of Byzantium. The great hall
of the cathedral of St. Sophia has announced the advent of midnight which is the best time for spiritual
illumination. The cathedral dome is contemptuous of the ‘fury and the mire of
human veins’. The second stanza of the poem deals with poet’s vision. Now the
poet sees before him the figure of a man. Soon he realises that the figure is
more of a shade than a man, and more of an image than a shade. The poet now
describes a golden bird which is perched on the branch of a golden tree. It
does not undergo any change nor does it suffer from weariness, fever and the
fret of human beings. The poem rounds off with an account of Byzantium and its
golden age because they spoke of a kind of unity and perfection. He saw, in the
Byzantine culture, what he called the unity of being, a state in which art and
life interpenetrated each other. His desire for Byzantium was the antidote for
the ‘dissipation and despair’ that he found in the modern world.
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