On a Golden Bough. Bisanzio in due poesie di William Butler Yeats

English, 2021

This article attempts to accomplish a textual analysis of the poem Sailing to Byzantium composed by William Butler Yeats. The textual analysis incorporates the analysis of divergent aspects existed in a text. The crucial aspects are: the title of the poem, substance of the poem, form of the poem, tone of the speaker, sound devices, literary devices, diction, syntax, mode of expression, themes and so on. The article writer has tried to descry these aspects to analyze them in brief. This article, which involves the interpretation of the poem from the perspective of its texture, is significant to teachers and students who are engrossed in studying English poetry.

The sources of Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium'

Most of the critical literature and readings of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium", both form or content wise, focus on the aesthetic, spiritual or symbolic aspects of the poem, with occasional allusions to the biography of the writer. This research, apart from the allusive imagery and symbolic structure, presents a more critical view of the text. It attempts to highlight self-contradictory and irreconcilable outcome as well as paradoxical representations of both imagined spaces that have rarely been considered or examined. This article, therefore, analyzes the inconsistencies resulting from readers' expectations that stem from the outcomes of such mythical vision and what is unfolding by the end of the poem. The research shows that the speaker's disillusionment with his society, the fantasy of the body transcendence and the spatiotemporal idealization of Byzantium are based on false premises and fail the expectation of readers. These inconsistencies, the research argues, are the manifestation of the poet's desideratum for an immediate and perennial consolation of the suffering from life at old age and resort to the pleasure of art and beauty.

Journal of cultural linguistic and artistic studies, 2020

Yeats’s poem, Sailing to Byzantium, is a prominent poem about the contrastive relationship between youth and aged people. It is a speculative piece of poetry that might sanction critics to profoundly contemplate the various contrasts in life between the natural elements and the symbolical elements. The poem Sailing to Byzantium is constructed in reality, though it has to relocate outside reality to afford an element of a life that is sovereign of the other. The study intends to review the depth of some essential contrastive themes of Sailing to Byzantium such as youth, age, death, nature, abstraction, and art. The paper starts with a brief introduction, and then to be followed by a section about the poet W. B. Yeats. It moves ahead to reconnoiter the scope of the mentioned important themes in the poem, Sailing to Byzantium. After that, the study's process shifts to the section of discussion and then a brief conclusion. In this literary task, the researcher employs the descriptive-critical-analytical maneuver. قصيدة ’ييتس‘ الإبحار الى بيزنطة‘ تعتبر قصيدة بارزة عن العلاقة التباينية بين فئة الشباب وبين المعمرين من الناس، إنها قطعة شعرية تأملية والتي تتيح للنقاد التمعن بعمق حول التناقضات المختلفة في الحياة – بين العناصر الطبيعية والعناصر الرمزية، قصيدة ’الإبحار الى بيزنطة‘ بناها الشاعر على وقائع حقيقة، وبرغم ذلك فيمكن بنائها خارج نطاق الواقع لتُقدم عُنصرً من عناصرِ الحياةِ والذي يمكن اعتباره أسمى من الآخر. تهدف الدراسة إلى استعراض عمق عدد من الموضوعات الأساسية والمتناقضة في قصيدة ’الإبحار إلى بيزنطة‘ مثل الشباب، العمر، الموت، الطبيعة، التجريد والفن، حيث تبدأ الورقة بمقدمة موجزة ، ثم تُتبع بجزئية عن الشاعر وليام بتلر ييتس (W. B. Yeats)، ومِن ثمَ تمضي الدراسة قدماً لاستكشاف نطاق الموضوعات المهمة والمستوحاة من قصيدة ’الإبحار إلى بيزنطة‘، وبعد ذلك تتحول عملية الدراسة والتحليل الى جزئية المناقشة، والتي تُتبع بخاتمة موجزة، في هذه العمل البحثي، يستخدم الباحث منهج الوصف والنقد والتحليل.

Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies , 2013

Two well-known poems of W. B. Yeats are seen here in a specific perspective of Creation primal elements (earth, water, air, fire) by a symbolical point of view. Certainly, there are different interpretations of these poems, where symbolic point of view is fundamental. The very symbols which interpretation / analyses focus on are sailing (travelling) and city (Byzantium). Through our interpretation we use to move forward: There is a fore text according to which author uses to construct/create a poem, being and feeling himself as a creator (author). According to this creative thought he move structurally and mentally travelling (sailing) to the city of a mystical significance, Byzantium (New Jerusalem) through which he try to evoke symbolically/poetically Revelation and be part elementarily with Creation of Bible, that is to say: he creates a poetry with a the creation/poetry aim to be structurally and ideally well ordered and harmonized as Creation is. In this point of view the Creat...

the-criterion.com

A quest for permanence across the webs of the temporal is what a reader has to peregrinate through, if he seeks to traverse the scope of W.B Yeats's 'Sailing To Byzantium', and the same apply to John Keats's 'Ode To A Nightingale' as well. Despite the fact, that the two poems are separated from one another by a temporal gap of one hundred years, the string of thematic unity running between the two only confirm the fact, that poetic sensibilities of major poets seems to follow the same course. Both the poems are problemetized in and around the recognition of imperfections, consequent upon dichotomous human existence, as also the search for a symbol which would help alleviate that. Structurally too the semblances between the two poems are startling: a world of sensuous details, cushioning within it the semiotics of flux and change on the one hand, and the deemed symbol of perfection on the other. The bridge between the imperfection of life, and the symbol that is perfect is provided by the imagination. Byzantium as conceived by Yeats is an act of imagination, and this is equally true of the Nightingale world of Keats (Rudra 55-56).Prof. Arup Rudra in his comparative study of the two poems, is of the opinion, that Yeats's poem is a victory of the will in that the poem ends with an image of the absorption of the self into the projected image of a golden bird, whereas Keats's poem is a recognition of defeat conditioned by the fact that he has to return to his sole self (55).And furthermore that, "Yeats forces the pace of his imagination to become victorious, yet what stands out with tragic dilemma is 'the tattered coat upon a stick'" (55). It is precisely with an attempt to unravel the probable cause of this wrestling with the imagination to become victorious, on the part of William Butler Yeats, that I am tempted to offer a different view. I propose that in writing "Sailing To Byzantium", Yeats was under an anxiety of Influence with Keats's "Ode To A Nightingale". That this claim of mine would be open to refutation from various quarters, on the ground that the formative influences upon Yeats was exerted by Shelley, Spencer, the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century is something that I anticipate. Also as Harold Bloom in his reading of the Yeatsian poems, had traced the literary source of "Sailing To Byzantium" in Shelley's allegorical epic "The Revolt Of Islam", I presume that I have to grapple with the larger question of authority as well (Bloom, Tower 345). However I would like to counter such objections by citing a line or two from Bloom himself. In the first chapter of "A Map Of Misreading", Bloom maintains, Poetic influence in the sense I give to it, has nothing to do with the verbal resemblances between one poet and another. Hardy on the surface scarcely resembles Shelley his prime precursor. But then Browning, who resembles Shelley even less, was yet more Shelley's ephebe than even Hardy was…. What Blake called the spiritual form, at once the aboriginal poetical self and the true subject, is what the ephebe is so dangerously obliged to the precursor for ever possessing (Lodge 248). However since the feasibility of my claim is subject to the parameters of Bloom's "Theory Of Poetry", a synoptic overview of " The Anxiety Of Influence" therefore becomes imperative at this stage. The search for poetic space for a "strong poet" according to Bloom essentially entails finding of a voice, that is securely distinctive, and consequently, the act of writing assumes the form of a deliberate misreading, and rewriting of one's predecessors. It is designed to dethrone a strong predecessor, and is analogous to the Freudian castration complex,

Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies

Yeats's love for words and spoken language of the common people in general coupled with his intrinsic moorings in Irish dialect directed his focus on the conversational and the colloquial. The influence of William Blake on Yeats, among other factors, whetted his dialectic sensibility. Finally, his innate love for drama and the dramatic led him to fiddle with both conflict and dialogue. Yeats's very penchant for the dramatic triggered off his fascination with conflict which, in turn, precipitated his dialectical sensibility couched through the 'dialogic', both in its neutral sense, and also in a Bakhtinian sense of the term. Using the theoretical tools of Bakhtin's "Dialogism", this paper examines Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium" as a "dialogic" poem in general, and "polyphonic" poem in particular.

Poetry in Late Byzantium, ed. K. Kubina, 2024

Poems in the Late Byzantine period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) were marvelously multifaceted in their contexts of production, functions, genres, subjects, forms, and language registers. For the purposes of this book, poetry is defined in a purely formal way as “everything in verse”, thus encompassing both shorter texts, such as epigrams and monodies, and long verse narratives (overall c.170,000 verses). The temporal framework, which might seem merely a politically-inspired convenience, is in fact broadly valid, as the calamities of the Fourth Crusade and the Ottoman conquest which bookend this period led not only to a break of some decades in poetry production, in the early thirteenth and the mid-fifteenth centuries respectively, but also influenced the forms and functions of the poems. Spatially, the centers of poetry production were far apart from each other and situated in various political contexts, including the Salento, Nicaea, Epirus, Trebizond, Crete, Cyprus, Thessaloniki, the Peloponnese, and humanist Italym as well as, of course, in Constantinople. By mapping this rich and multifarious literary landscape, this first chapter offers the framework for the following case studies gathered in this volume.

The Yeats Journal of Korea, 2020

This paper compares Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" and Jibananda Das's "Banalata Sen" keeping in mind the issue of some critics' branding both poems as quest and escape poems. Both as travel poems portray the eternal thirst for knowing the unknown. In these poems, both poets express their dissatisfaction with the mundane life and their desire to find solace in their creative pursuit. The 'desire of oblivion' runs through every poetic vein of these poems. I attempt to analyze and establish both poems as escape and quest poems, which undergo transformation.