Yeats on Byzantium

As certain gold-work has been on my mind these days. There is some commentary that may be worth a read at the end.

Sailing to Byzantium

I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
–Those dying generations — at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,(1)
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
(1927)

Byzantium

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 miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit 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.

Now for some comments on the poems: Karl Parker makes the interesting comment in his comparative study that these poems are a sort of progression, the later poem being in fact a rewrite of the first one. That said, I’d like to concentrate on the motifs here that recur in other poems of Yeats. The starting point will be the pivotal motif of the golden bird. Now in the first poem the materiality of the bird is insisted on(“Such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make/of hammered gold and gold enameling”) and in the second poem the immateriality(“more miracle than bird or handiwork”). Moreover, the second bird attempts perfection beyond what anything mortal is capable of. But there is still the subtle distinction between the “perched” in the first poem and the “planted” in the second poem, and the “perched” establishes the first bird as partaking of the impossible balance that is central to Yeat’s poems on art like “My table” or even poems on actual events like “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”(where the airman’s flight is “in balance with this life, this death). It’s a sort of very fragile sensation of what exactly artistic brilliance is. And it’s also un-achievable by mortals. The first poem places the perfection of byzantium in mosaicked saints(a nifty little link, incidentally, between the glow of “God’s holy fire’ and the glow of the gold mosaics) that must be summoned down off walls; they are both figuratively and literally distant. This motif is carried even further in the second poem by the disdaining dome, the inhuman mummy, the “flames no faggot[n.b. in this case faggot is an archaic term for a bundle of sticks] feeds nor steel has lit). The mortal airman of “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” is still distanced from earthly concerns and of course is about to join the ranks of the immortal. One also sees in the first poem, incidentally, a sort of claim that the poetry Yeats seeks is impossible in his time and place, and it would be a fine subject for a study to determine what exactly for Yeats constituted possible poetry.

Two poems on craftsmanship

Since the theme is on my mind these days.

First, My Table by Yeats.
Two heavy trestles, and a board
Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,
By pen and paper lies,
That it may moralise
My days out of their aimlessness.
A bit of an embroidered dress
Covers its wooden sheath.
Chaucer had not drawn breath
When it was forged. In Sato’s house,
Curved like new moon, moon-luminous,
It lay five hundred years.
Yet if no change appears
No moon; only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art.
Our learned men have urged
That when and where ’twas forged
A marvellous accomplishment,
In painting or in pottery, went
From father unto son
And through the centuries ran
And seemed unchanging like the sword.
Soul’s beauty being most adored,
Men and their business took
Me soul’s unchanging look;
For the most rich inheritor,
Knowing that none could pass Heaven’s door
That loved inferior art,
Had such an aching heart
That he, although a country’s talk
For silken clothes and stately walk,
Had waking wits; it seemed
Juno’s peacock screamed.

And now an ode to bad work. N.B.:The lines are suppose to jump something like –_ but the formatting won’t work for some reason.
Junk, by Richard Wilbur

Huru Welandes
worc ne geswiceσ?
monna ænigum
σara σe Mimming can
heardne gehealdan.

—Waldere

An axe angles
from my neighbor’s ashcan;
It is hell’s handiwork,
the wood not hickory,
The flow of the grain
not faithfully followed.
The shivered shaft
rises from a shellheap
Of plastic playthings,
paper plates,
And the sheer shards
of shattered tumblers
That were not annealed
for the time needful.
At the same curbside,
a cast-off cabinet
Of wavily warped
unseasoned wood
Waits to be trundled
in the trash-man’s truck.
Haul them off! Hide them!
The heart winces
For junk and gimcrack,
for jerrybuilt things
And the men who make them
for a little money,
Bartering pride
like the bought boxer
Who pulls his punches,
or the paid-off jockey
Who in the home stretch
holds in his horse.
Yet the things themselves
in thoughtless honor
Have kept composure,
like captives who would not
Talk under torture.
Tossed from a tailgate
Where the dump displays
its random dolmens,
Its black barrows
and blazing valleys,
They shall waste in the weather
toward what they were.
The sun shall glory
in the glitter of glass-chips,
Foreseeing the salvage
of the prisoned sand,
And the blistering paint
peel off in patches,
That the good grain
be discovered again.
Then burnt, bulldozed,
they shall all be buried
To the depth of diamonds,
in the making dark
Where halt Hephaestus
keeps his hammer
And Wayland’s work
is worn away.