Sailing To Byzantium

In this 1928 poem Yeats lamented the ravages of old age upon his vigorous body.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick

Then Yeats ruminates time's compensation.

A tattered coat upon a stick,
Unless Soul claps its hands and sing,
And louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.

Yeats wishes his earthly reincarnation not again into a life form that would suffer again the bodily decline. He wishes to return as a tree made of precious metals or as its singing mechanical prophetic bird.

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 enamelling
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.

Friend of Yeats, fellow Irishman C.S. Lewis in his novel, That Hideous Strength, imagined Yeats as Merlin awakened in the twentieth-century from his long sleep by a medieval-language professor to restore England to its soulful past.

Such is the Western sailing or rather the same dreaming into Constantinople/Byzantium. She glitters in gold and silver on the horn of Asia-Minor, of spires and bells and majestic icons and heavenly hymns and legions of priests and saints and murderous mobs and soldiers. Constantinople/Byzantium in the Western poetic mind has become a magnet for all native and national dreams and longings. She is the compensation for the ravages of time and ultimately death.

She is Constantine's city – that is the literal meaning of Constantinople. He is the fourth-century son of a Serbian peasant soldier and Caesar, who in one of the interminable civil wars once looked up at the evening sky and saw a Christian cross and a Latin Christian sign. At that moment it was eternity, and the world would never be the same again. So once master of the Empire, he built his golden city on the bridge between Europe and Asia and called it New Rome. This was Rome with the living blood of the native Roman patricians and their civilising culture but liberated from the dead blood and fire of their pagan religion. Constantine was as if Cortes were an Indian internal liberator.