Yeats’ Byzantium wasn’t the real one—but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be.
In two poems about the great city, William Butler Yeats created a passionately fictional, deeply personal symbol for the kind of society in which he would have been happiest to have lived. Yeats’ Byzantines had successfully united spiritual and material good through the establishment of a social order based on the production of great art. Byzantium, therefore, was an ideal metaphorical home for someone like Yeats himself—a great, aging artist who felt empty and adrift in the spiritually barren early 20th century. In Yeats’ Byzantium, a person could reach a “state of being”—a kind of artistic fulfillment combined with spiritual satisfaction combined with material comfort—simply not attainable in Yeats’ own world.
But Yeats’ individual fixation with Byzantium did not exist in an intellectual vacuum: we can situate it in his larger, also uniquely personal, structural conception of history. By connecting Yeats’ metaphorical Byzantium with his expansive, systematic view of history outlined in his difficult 1925 work, A Vision, we might be able to get a sense of how Byzantium figured into Yeats’ historical worldview, and what that meant for the hope Yeats harbored for his own time.
In a complex 1925 book titled A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka, Yeats explores the relationship between history and the occult, and endeavors to find concepts outside God and science that could account for changes in the nature of human life and society throughout time. The book was published privately and, to that end, was primarily an exercise in documenting, but not disseminating, an elaborate esoteric system Yeats and his wife, Georgie Hyde Lees, had created for understanding major phenomena in the world, especially the nature of history. In A Vision, Yeats conjures a structured systematized way to understand history and, beyond that, to account for the unexplainable (Yeats—at one point a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—and his wife were both deeply interested in mysticism and the occult, and experimented obsessively with “automatic writing”). This “vision” centered around the concept of the “gyre,” a geometric and intellectual representation of cyclical history. The “gyre” is an image which pops up in many places in Yeats’ poetry, including “Sailing to Byzantium.”
Yeats describes the “gyre,” a spiralling, double-coned shape, as the “Principal Symbol” of his vision of history in the first section of A Vision, entitled “The Great Wheel.” Yeats was a believer in reincarnation and A Vision is replete with cyclical and regenerative images, including the twenty-eight “Phases of the Moon,” the “Four Faculties” of human beings, and the “Twenty-Eight Incarnations” (different states of human personality that mapped onto lunar phases). Yeats believed that time itself could be divided into twelve cycles of twenty-eight incarnations each, “typically reaching completion in a Great Year of 26,000 years.” In a section of the book titled “Dove or Swan,” Yeats applies the gyre concept to “Historical Cycles within the Great Year, in periods of 2000 and 1000 years,” separating the 2,000 years before Christ with the 2,000 years after (a concept which very much connects to his poem, “The Second Coming,” which features Yeats’ most famous poetic use of the “gyre”).
According to the “Dove and the Swan” concept, Yeats believed that human history up to his lifetime could be divided into two major historical cycles, the first classical and the second Christian. First, the “Swan” represents Zeus’ rape of Leda in Greek myth, the act which birthed Helen of Tory (and which Yeats also wrote about it in his poem “Leda and the Swan”— his worldview in A Vision ripples throughout his poetry). Completing that cycle and starting the next was the “Dove,” or the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception (symbolized by the Dove, a symbol for the Holy Ghost). That trumpet blast of a magical birth announced the beginning of Yeats’ Christian cycle of human history (to be ended, perhaps, by the Falcon in “The Second Coming,” although it’s unclear whether Yeats intended for that avian metaphor to carry this meaning). Just as the “Swan” inaugurated the tragedies of antiquity (the Trojan War being a fight over Helen, Leda’s daughter by Zeus the Swan), so too did the “Dove” inaugurate the tragedy of Christ’s crucifixion and the brutal modern world (also, interestingly, through a birth). The cyclical Dove and Swan archetypes mapped onto the movement of history through Yeats’ gyres.
Yeats used the gyres and his regimented and abstractly mathematical way of organizing history—one which possibly only made complete sense in his own mind, and maybe that of his wife— to make sense of his present. Yeats needed this unique view of history in order to survive in the maddening period of his own life. Yeats’ obsession with compressed, highly symbolic, and abstract capital-H History was not an armchair obsession—his life was, more than most, shaped by world-historical events, like the First World War and the fight for Irish independence, giving him a profound sensitivity for history as a force. “To me [A Vision] means a last act of defence against the chaos of the world,” Yeats wrote to a friend in April 1924. In his poetry linked to the ideas in A Vision, Yeats would fully explore this connection between past and present—and future. The metaphor connecting these ideas was Byzantium.
The city of Byzantium—not the gyre, or the Cycles, or the Dove and the Swan, or the Phases of the Moon—would be most spiritually comforting metaphor for Yeats within his poetic-imaginative system of history. Yeats’ first documented writing about the Byzantines is in “Rosa Alchemica,” an 1896 short story. In “Rosa Alchemica,” the protagonist, a stand-in for Yeats, joins a secret society of alchemists (including Michael Robartes, a character in A Vision), in pursuit of ultimate truth and spiritual transcendence (as one does). Although Yeats wrote the story years before he first began to formulate his system (that started around 1917), “Rosa Alchemica” contains several of the ingredients of Yeats’ eventual poetic Byzantium, including humanism, mysticism, and the supremacy of the artist (in this case, in the form of the alchemist). In essence, Byzantium was the phase of history that Yeats wanted to be in—it was the position he wanted to have on the gyre.
All of the themes of “Rosa Alchemica” mentioned above take center stage in Yeats’ two famous poems with “Byzantium” in the title. These works are Yeats’ greatest poetic searches for comfort and meaning in his own intimidating cyclical system of history (in contrast with “The Second Coming,” a deeply pessimistic work about the return of evil, void of comforting thoughts). In “Sailing to Byzantium,” first published in 1927, Yeats directly uses the metaphor of the gyre, linking the concepts of the poem to the intellectual and religious system outlined in A Vision. Line three of stanza three references a “perne in a gyre.” The image (a perne is a bobbin in a spinning mill) appears at a moment in the poem when Yeats is discussing the divine power of the artistic life that can be lived at Byzantium (where “sages standing in God’s holy fire” can be “the singing-masters of my soul”). By referencing the gyre in this context, Yeats seems to be thinking wishfully that the system he outlines in A Vision will bring back the Byzantine lifestyle—which connected art and life in a way much better than his own society did—in the not too distant future in Yeats’ own world.
Elsewhere, the poem deals with old age and the triumph of art over time and secular power, preoccupations of much of Yeats’ best work. Yeats valued the Byzantines for their Greek adherence to personal discipline (in contrast with the decadent Romans) and the remarkable achievements of Byzantine artists (especially Greek goldsmiths, a possible link to Robartes and the alchemists in “Rosa Alchemica”), whom he believed were more appropriately exalted in their society than artists were in his own (which did nothing but “neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect”). Byzantium, in short, was Yeats’ ideal society for individual artists. In that sense, Yeats’ poetical Byzantium linked his cyclical concepts of the “objective” (dealing with the collective) and the “subjective” (dealing with the individual), creating an ideal environment, essentially, for him—an aging artist alienated by his own society and the cultural life of the modern world (“sick with desire / and fastened to a dying animal / it knows now what it is”).
In 1931, Yeats himself said of Byzantium, “I symbolise the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.’” That spiritual life could transcend the limits of nature and the body in Yeats’ own painfully human life—the art of Byzantium could envelop Yeats in the moon-phase cycles of history ( the “artifice of eternity”). When Yeats writes in the final line of “what is past, or passing, or to come,” he brings home his idea that Byzantium is a place that can—and does—exist throughout time. The notion that it might be coming again sustained Yeats through the darkness of his own time’s “history.”
In “Byzantium” (1932), a later poem that expands on this journey, Yeats writes more about the supremacy of art. Although Yeats does not directly mention the gyre in this poem, he reuses the image of the bobbin to similar effect, writing that “Hades’ bobbin” may “unwind the winding path,” or disentangle the spiraling trajectory of the gyre. Only in Byzantium could “fresh images beget” for Yeats—it was fertile terrain for poets, and the progress of its society was driven by the achievements of artists (again, in Yeats’ abstract interpretation, not in real life). The symbolic significance of the city within Yeats’ worldview outlined in A Vision placed it at the core of his poetic imagination. Only in Byzantium could Yeats ride the gyre of history on a “dolphin’s back.”
At first glance, Yeats’ Byzantium poems and A Vision do not seem directly connected (except for the one mention of the “gyre” in “Sailing”). But situating Yeats’ Byzantine ideal—a society of, by, and for artists—in the larger structure of Yeats’ vision of history reveals the position of profound importance that Byzantium held in Yeats’ conception of the material and spiritual world. It may also appear difficult to reconcile Yeats’ fascination with the occult with his conviction that there was a rationalistic and systematic, even mathematized, way to understand history. But the concept of the “gyre,” present in his Byzantium poems, actually was an occult concept—Yeats used it to explain the unexplainable (occult here meaning outside of science and the conventional, institutional Western God, the two device then and now more commonly used to explain the unexplainable). The gyre and related cyclical and regenerative imagery from A Vision, such as the phases of the moon, helped Yeats explain to himself how history moved, when its movement in his own time seemed so contingent and senseless.
And yet the simultaneous power of unreason in this vision—Yeats’ Dove and Swan cycles were symbolized by mythic miracles—indicates that, in some sense, Yeats may have believed in a kind of eternal recurrence of the impossible, across historical time periods and systems. This is why he writes that although Byzantium is long past, it may yet come again. While a true pessimist or cynic might identify the 20th century only as a “waste land” of “hollow men,” Yeats held out hope in his worldview for the return of a golden past (for old artists like him, at least). In other words, Byzantium was a node on the gyre that Yeats liked to think he was hurtling towards, not from. In A Vision, Yeats writes:
Each age unwinds the thread another age had wound…Persia fell, and that when full moon came around again, amid eastward-moving thought, and brought Byzantine glory, Rome fell; and that at the outset of our westward-moving Renaissance Byzantium fell; all things dying each other’s life, living each other’s death.
In Yeats’ view, cyclical history could be a hopeful concept, not a fatalistic one. It could be a formal, even religious, tool for injecting human meaning into the grand arc of human existence. That’s why Yeats’ lunar phases mapped not just onto historical places and periods, but onto “states of being,” or components of human personality. Byzantium was a phase of the moon, and therefore Byzantium was a state of being—a way that humans could be, in a certain society, at a certain time. Byzantium was past and future. But whether that moon was waxing or waning—whether a better or worse world was coming in the near term—even Yeats could not determine.
by Zachary Partnoy
