Sailing to Byzantium

Yeats employs the city as the antidote to nature. At first glance, this directly contradicts the typical stance of Modernists who preferred lines of flight away from the hustle and bustle of the wasteland of the metropolis. And yet, Byzantium is not just one city amongst others. For Yeats, it is the city of God—the holiest and most universal of cities, as it was a place in which artistry could prosper, as evidenced by Byzantium’s grandiose mosaics. Yeats believed that art was the pinnacle of human activity, which brings mortality closer to immortality. Byzantium, as a place of art, is outside of nature in an almost transcendent realm. In his essay, “Dove or Swan,” Yeats identified Byzantium as occupying the 15th phase of the Great Wheel, a time of absolute unity between the profane and the sacred: “I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religions, aesthetic and practical life were one, that architect and artifices […] spoke to the multitude and the few alike” (p. 279).

Yeats’s decision to mythologize Byzantium reveals a strong Christian influence in his poetics. The city was a significant locus of Christianity, which was the legal religion of the state.