Sailing to Byzantium

“Sailing to Byzantium” was written by William Butler Yeats, who was a native of Dublin, Ireland.  This particular poem spoke to me because I could feel the emotions of the character that was sailing away.  Some of the other modernist poems we have read, particularly those of Wallace Stevens, were hard for me to interpret and therefore I didn’t connect with them as closely. 

                The poem starts off with “That is no country for old men.  The young in one another’s arms…”  These lines immediately made me think that whoever is narrating this poem is an older person who feels that they don’t belong.  The speaker desires to be wanted and embraced, what he sees younger people experiencing.  The poem goes on to refer to dying fish to show that nature is a cycle and everything eventually dies.  The descriptions given of nature all associate it with youth.  Only the youth can thrive in nature because the older generations are just waiting to die off.

                The speaker wanted more from their life than waiting on death to approach.  This is his motivation or sailing to Byzantium.  The lines that spoke to me the most were when the man describes his deepest thoughts and reasoning for leaving.  “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.”  I interpreted these lines as the old man saying he wants to turn his spirit into something eternal, such as art.  He wants to channel his heart into something other than keeping it “fastened to a dying animal.”  He doesn’t want his soul to die with him.  Paintings, sculptures, and mosaics are all eternal and prized in Byzantium.  He wants to join in on this everlasting culture.

                When my great-grandmother died she left behind all of the quilts she had made me and my brother, along with her Singer sewing machines.  Every time I see these items, I am reminded of her personality and how much she loved us.  Her spirit and all of her memories are sewn into her quilts.  She will never be here to talk to us again, but I am thankful that she left a piece of her with us.  I think this is similar to photographs, also.  Without pictures, I would be lost.  It’s how I look back on my fondest memories and the people in my life that I miss.  Without art and photography, it would be very difficult to leave behind a piece of ourselves, unless we do something that changes the world forever.  Since most of us aren't going to be well-known by everyone on Earth, the least we can do is try to preserve ourselves within our family and among our friends. 

The Second Coming

"The Second Coming", written by William Butler Yeats, grabbed my interest as I read it.  I thought it was unusual that the poem's form was so irregular.  There were no end-rhymes included in the poem and it read like a moment in time that was captured.  These literary choices by Yeats led me to believe that he must have had a motive in writing this poem the way he did.  In my opinion, he wrote "The Second Coming" so strangely to make it more mysterious.  "The Second Coming" is intentionally ambiguous to allow the reader to make their own assumptions about the meaning.

When I hear the phrase "Second Coming", I immediately think of Christ's Second Coming.  Even though it is clear that Yeats is not referring to Christ specifically, the phrase "second coming" means that a transition of some kind is occurring.  We live in times of unknown circumstances.  The world is changing rapidly, and at the time Yeats wrote this poem, he was witnessing the Irish Civil War unraveling and the damage World War I had caused.  We cannot control the future, but we can attempt to make a change if we see things starting to go awry.  The "rocking cradle" towards the end of the poem is a symbol of hope and rebirth.  If we change our ways, we have the ability to change the world and the direction it is heading. 

My favorite line of the poem is, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."  To me, this line is a call to action.  If we have an idea to change the world for the better, we need to share it with others.  So many wonderful ideas have probably been buried with their creators.  People with thoughts of evil are the ones who live to get their point across and change others for the worst.  We need to reverse this and circulate positive thoughts to others.

The beast that is depicted in the poem is "a shape with lion body and the head of a man."  I see this hybrid beast as a representation of man's transformation.  Yeats is showing that slowly but surely, humans are changing into harsh animals without a conscience.  With war and devastation, we lose our humanity a little each time.  Soon, things will fall apart.  "The centre cannot hold" forever, and if we continue down the path we are headed, "mere anarchy" will control the world.  I may be a bit far out in my interpretations, but I took Yeats' ambiguous theme as an invitation to attach my own ideas to the poem.  After reading through the poem a few times,  I still feel the same way about it as I did at the beginning.  I think that Yeats' point was to show that the future is a mystery, as is the true meaning of his poem.