Yeats and Byzantium

Author(s): William Empson

Source: Grand Street , Summer, 1982, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), pp. 67-95
Published by: Ben Sonnenberg

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/25006437

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 GRAND STREET

YEATS AND BYZANTIUM

William Empson
Ihad a short article on "Sailing to Byzantium" and "By
zantium" in A Review of English Studies for Sum
mer 1960, arguing that they are not so transcendental
as many critics have assumed. If Yeats had meant what
these people say, the poems would be in bad taste, mark
ing a low, not a high, spiritual condition. The argument
was from internal evidence, and I thought no more was
needed. I was taken aback when a friend said: "Excel
lent; you have shown that Yeats was a pig unless he
meant what you say, and obviously he didn't mean that;
so now we know he was a pig, as always seemed prob
able." Justice then demanded that I should peer round
for external evidence, though with little hope that it
had survived. This was lucky for me, as I would not
otherwise have read two studies of the rough drafts for
these splendid poems: one by Curtis Bradford, "Yeats's
Byzantium Poems," in Twentieth Century Views, the
other by Jon Stallworthy in his book Between the Lines
(1963). I am rather against the collecting of rough
drafts, but Yeats was right to let those pile up in a
folder; in the main, they are not boss shots but extra
material which his technique forced him to exclude.
What was ripening in his mind would have made a good
science fiction long-short, but he took for granted that
he had to compress it into one or two Symbolist poems.
The drafts, in letting us recover some of the rejected de
tail, make clear I think that his spiritual tone had re
mained decent, instead of becoming sanctimonious in
the manner so often praised.
Perhaps it is not basically a matter of good taste.
English and American critics interpret Yeats's poems as
implying Christian doctrines whenever that is possible,
and when they find it impossible they treat the passage
with a tactful sigh as merely a lapse, because they can
not conceive of a good man, with a good heart, holding
any other religious belief. He may often, they feel, be a

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 GRAND STREET

skeptic, but he cannot really believe in Theosophy; at

best, that would be a kind of play-acting. The compul
sion is particularly striking in The Unicorn by Virginia
Moore (1954), who starts out with a firm intellectual
recognition that she must examine how Yeats's beliefs
affect his poetry, and the book is a rich mine of attrac
tive information, but she appears to end her penultimate
chapter "Was Yeats a Christian?" with the sentiment
that he must have been pretty Christian if he could stay
friends with Ezra Pound.
Both these writers on the draft versions insist that
Yeats meant Paradise by Byzantium, and therefore that
"the central correlative of Byzantium is not Justinian's
sixth-century city." Here is the main point where I dis
agree, but it would be foolish to quarrel merely over the
term Paradise. They are wrong if they mean Heaven by
it, as they presumably must when they assert the pres
ence of God the Father, but on the right line if they mean
a possible stage towards Heaven. Even so, it is a bad
term to describe such a bustling and metropolitan stage,
for the ghosts of many periods of history and many na
tions arrive there (it is the Byzantium of the tenth cen
tury, not of the sixth) and purge themselves; much as an
Edwardian gentleman, after the excesses of the season,
would take the waters at Bath or Baden-Baden.
I must quote at once the few explanations given by
Yeats himself. He wrote in a letter of October 1926:

I have just finished a poem in which a poet of the Mid

dle Ages besought the saints 'in their holy fire' to send
their ecstasy.

This would be an early draft of "Sailing to Byzantium,"

and it seems clear that the poet asked for the ecstasy
during his present life, not after death. Yeats wrote a
prose outline for his own guidance before starting "By
zantium" (April 30, 1930) which says:

Describe Byzantium as it is in the system towards the

end of the first Christian millennium.

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

-that is, in his own system, which he had expounded in

A Vision (1924); it treats the city as a type of the unity
of aesthetic and religious experience. An addition to the
outline says:

A walking mummy. Flames at the street comers where

the soul is purified. Birds of hammered gold singing in
the golden trees. In the harbour, [dolphins] offering
their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry
them to Paradise.

Another reference shows that the word "dolphins" got

left out here; to make the artificial birds carry the saints
to Heaven would be too much strain. By the time he
had finished, he had come to generalize the transport
work of these dolphins; but from the start the city itself
is obviously not Heaven. Also there are two comments
planned for broadcast readings; in the first, for an Irish
audience (1931), he said:

When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells and

making the jewelled croziers in the National Museum,
Byzantium was the centre of European civilisation and
the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolise the
search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.

The patriot would easily reflect that Ireland in her great

missionary period was a healthier place than Byzantium,
though that capital had, so to speak, the foie gras of the
spiritual life. He could revere its saints and its art and
yet believe, as he occasionally suggests in A Vision, that
the spiritual rarities were won at the cost of corrupting
most of the population. He broadcast later, on a visit
to America:

There is a record of a tree of gold with artificial birds

which sang. The tree was somewhere in the Royal Pal
ace of Byzantium. I use it as a symbol of the intellectual
joy of eternity, as contrasted with the instinctive joy of
human life.

This is rather misleading, but he certainly believed that

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 GRAND STREET

some of the intellectual joy can be felt during life in this

world. Some notes for lectures in America (1932) give
a little more evidence:

Aristotle says that if you give a ball to a child, and if it

was the best ball in the market, though it cost but six
pence, it is an example of magnificence; and style,
whether in life or literature, comes, I think, from excess,
from that something over and above utility which
wrings the heart. In my later poems I have called it
Byzantium, that city where the saints showed their
wasted forms upon a background of gold mosaic, and an
artificial bird sang upon a tree of gold in the presence
of the emperor; and in one poem I have pictured the
ghosts swimming, mounted upon dolphins, through the
sensual seas, that they may dance upon its pavements.

Surely it is important to realise that the magnificence of

Aristotle is not a Christian virtue but the supreme secu
lar one; there could be no occasion for it in Heaven. We
find here that a dolphin can carry a ghost to the capital
of this virtue also; and the ghosts give a more holiday
impression than before; at least they are no longer wail
ing. Mr. Stallworthy, the most recent critic to discuss
the drafts, makes a pleasanter impression than the earlier
ones because he has the nerve to blame the poet for the
opinions with which he is saddled.

As several critics have noted, the Emperor in the two

Byzantium poems is clearly a symbol of divinity. ...
That Yeats's symbol of divinity is in danger of falling
asleep, but for the singing of Yeats's soul, is a revealing
commentary on the poet's view of God and of himself.

What it reveals is that all these critics have been libeling

Yeats, not on purpose but because they cannot grasp
the spiritual points at which he differed from Mr.
Chadband.
In the summer of 1924 Yeats took boat to Stockholm
for the ceremony of receiving the Nobel Prize; the Irish
Civil War was over, and he had been made a Senator

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

an anxious duty, as he could not do enough to help

either the arts or the Protestant Ex-Ascendancy, and he
was thankful for the Prize because he hoped it would
give him more influence. In the autumn, bad health
made him winter in the Mediterranean, and he saw some
of the late Byzantine mosaics of Sicily. He had seen the
early examples at Ravenna in 1907 and drew upon the
memory for "Sailing to Byzantium" (Between the
Lines), which he began in 1925. He became sixty in that
year. Thus he was faced directly with the problem of
how to behave as a distinguished old father-figure with
out hypocrisy and this problem had thrust itself upon
him quite suddenly; the final text of the poem already
seemed to me frank about this, before I had read the
earlier drafts. The first step towards the poem, Mr. Stall
worthy decides, was a page of personal reflections never
used again:

Now the day is come I will speak on those

Loves I have had in play . . .
That my soul loved
That I loved in my first youth
For many loves have I taken off my clothes
For some I threw them off in haste, for some slowly and
indifferently
and laid down on my bed that I might be ..
but now I will take off my body

That they might be enfolded in that for which they had

longed
I live on love
That which is myself alone
0 let me still be enfolded in my . .
and how shall we ever grow very . . .

(The handwriting is hard to read, and more may per

haps be read in the future.) No one could accuse this of
being spiritually pretentious. But one might find it too
intimate, and Yeats next planned to express the basic
idea in terms of another person's experience, using the
symbols he had recently worked out in A Vision. He
knew the city of formal magnificence, "rigid, abstract

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 GRAND STREET

and fanatical" as a draft calls it; he himself was a thou

sand years too late, but other Irish poets had actually
made the trip, while Ireland was leading Western Eu
rope out of the Dark Ages. A fragment exists showing
that Yeats let a Danish merchant fulfil a vow by ship
ping such a man as a pilgrim. The dolphin keeps rearing
its head in the drafts, but it does not fit a historically
possible journey, and he managed to hold it in reserve
till the last verse of the second poem.
This Dark-Age poet, however, could not express why
the twentieth century needed the Byzantine style, and
soon began turning back into Yeats; a rather early draft
makes him complain that his public, or maybe the
mountain gnomes, "cry that my tale is told, my story
sung," and the saints in the mosaics are henceforth
called "sages"-which meant classical or Asian, not
Christian, holy men. The voyage remains real, as it was
in the line "sail southeastward towards Byzantium";
but it now also involves time-travel, because the spirit
of Yeats must go back a thousand years. I suppose this
is why so many critics have asserted that he went to
Paradise instead, but the process that he calls "dreaming
back," in the chapter of A Vision called "The Soul in
Judgement," is just the same; he cites the book called
An Adventure by two lady dons, who in the garden of
the Petit Trianon found themselves contemporary with
Marie Antoinette. He also covers the case of the Egyp
tian mummy in the poem, who has come at least as far
forward in time as Yeats has gone back. In "the sixth
and final state" before rebirth, he says, the spirit

can see the most remote consequences of the most trivial

acts of the living, provided these consequences are part
of its future life. In trying to prevent them it may be
come one of those frustrators dreaded by certain spirit
mediums. One must suppose such spirits gathered into
bands-for as yet they are without individuality-and
with the consent of the Thirteenth Cone playing a part
resembling that of the 'Censor' in modern psychology.
(Section IX)

A spirit may delay its rebirth for centuries, becoming

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

a guardian of a temple, or employed in taking care of

the newly dead, if its nature requires unique circum
stances for its rebirth (Section VIII). It cannot be re
born until "it accepts its future life, declares it just," and
making a good decision about one's next birth is of
course a very important step. This mummy has delayed
too long, a fusspot perhaps; but we need not doubt that
it has important business at the watering-place, and
would be a good steady type to give Yeats some tips.
People have naturally suspected blarney in such pro
nouncements of the poet, or in the whole scheme of
A Vision. A believer in any form of life after death,
one would think, is liable to have bouts of uncertainty,
but Yeats did not consider the story he tells in the two
poems at all an impossible one. A man is not suspected
like this if he says he believes in Christian immortality,
though it is inherently much less probable than rebirth,
and also unjust, not allowing you another chance
(though the circumstances of your life often warp your
moral character). Geoffrey Gorer recently conducted a
questionnaire in England, finding that only half the
population believe in any afterlife, while a quarter of
those believers do not expect it to be eternal. A twen
tieth of the answerers directly said they believed in re
incarnation. The belief is not recommended by any
organized body they are likely to have met with, so this
seems to prove that it is found natural. Also it is old
and widespread, and Yeats was determined to accept
such beliefs rather than those of current fashion. G. K.
Chesterton's Autobiography gives a good picture of
Yeats's practical attitude to the supernatural (and, of
course, to understand his poems, I am trying to take the
same attitude). As a young man he startled literary
London by presenting himself as The Man who Knew
the Fairies:

He staggered the materialists by attacking their abstract

materialism with a completely concrete mysticism;
"Imagination!" he would say with withering contempt;
"There wasn't much imagination when Farmer Hogan
was dragged out of bed and thrashed like a sack of

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 GRAND STREET

potatoes-that they did, they had 'um out," the Irish

accent warming with scorn; "they had 'um out and
thumped 'um, and that's not the sort of thing a man
wants to imagine." But the concrete examples were not
only a comedy; he used one argument which was sound,
and I have never forgotten it. It is the fact that it is not
abnormal men like artists, but normal men like peasants,
who have borne witness a thousand times to such things;
it is the farmers who see the fairies.

This, of course, was long before Yeats wrote "Byzan

tium"; a few years after it, when near his death, he wrote
"News for the Delphic Oracle," in which the dolphins
are certainly not only used to carry spirits to Heaven.
They are carrying Plotinus, of all people, as well as
Pythagoras and some Irish worthies, to a classical orgy:

And the brute dolphins plunge

Until, in some cliff-sheltered bay
Where wades the choir of love
Proffering its sacred laurel crowns
They pitch their burdens off . . .

It is not directly said that the sages take part, but a

later section of the poem labors to present bodily en
joyment:

Foul goat-head, bestial arm appear,

Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fish-like; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.

A friend of Plotinus, after his death, asked the Delphic

Oracle where his soul had gone, and it made a splendid
reply (available to Yeats from 1917 in McKenna's trans
lation of Plotinus). At death, it said, this friend of
Apollo "entered at once the heavenly consort," on the
shores of a "wave-washed coast":

where fragrant breezes play, where all is unison and

tenderness and divine joy, and the place is lavish of the
nectar-streams the unfailing Gods bestow, and with the
blandishments of the Loves . . . where dwell the just
Aeacus, and Plato, consecrated power, and stately Py

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

thagoras and all else that form the Choir of Immortal

Love . . .

Thus the sages themselves are the choir, and Yeats

makes them wade, at least, in this foam. As Milton
might have said of his own interpretation of the loves
of the spirits, if the oracle did not mean something very
like sexual pleasure, its language was culpably mislead
ing. Yeats had been suspicious of Plotinus' doctrine
as late as The Tower (1926) but had come round to
admiring it, and in 1931 he echoes this oracle in a poem
of placid dignity; but in 1939, his final year, it had to be
presented with comic realism. It seems clear that spirits
may have all sorts of experiences while waiting to be
reborn, and dolphins may carry them to the Isles of the
Blessed as well as to the Supreme Heaven; but F.A.C.
Wilson (W. B. Yeats and Tradition) firmly calls the
place Heaven, explaining that the satyrs are preparing
to be reborn from it. He also quotes from a commentary
on Plotinus by Henry More, deducing that the soul will
not only enjoy Philosophy in the next life but also "in
nocent Pastimes, in which the Musical and Amorous
propension may be also recreated"; this it seems was
"favourite reading" for Yeats, and Milton is believed to
have taken his doctrine of the angels from the same
passage (first published in 1659 and the unfortunate
More was soon struggling to explain it away).
It seems often to be thought that Yeats, towards the
end, became iconoclastic about the high spiritual tone
he had taken earlier; surely it is much more probable
that he realized, with a shock, that his admirers had
been reading him in a sickly manner, and tried to stop
them. He was too stubborn-minded to change one of
his major beliefs without telling people so; and the
poem itself is not cross but gay. I suppose he would
feel that Plotinus was "served right," as well as re
warded, 'by being given in the next life what he had
renounced in this; indeed all the codgers look rather
comical; but Plotinus of course was not a Christian-the
Introduction to McKenna's text remarks how weak he is
on Repentance and the Dark Night of the Soul-and I am

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 GRAND STREET

not sure what reason he could have given for rejecting

entertainment offered by Apollo. Yeats had now come
to regard the dolphins as all-purpose transport animals,
in an afterlife which offered many mansions of wide
variety; and he would regard them in a practical way,
as he had regarded supernatural beings all his life.
Many of the letters to Sturge Moore (now a separate
book) discuss philosophy; this Moore, as well as draw
ing the very beautiful cover for The Tower, was brother
to G.E. Moore, and could be used as a backdoor means
of contact, as by a palace intrigue, with that intellectual
royalty. Yeats flounders, and often deserves the scolding
that is relayed to him from above; but in March 1926
(for example) the modem reader must feel, as Chester
ton had done earlier, that there is a real argument be
hind the charming wilfulness:

Forty years ago the Society for Psychical Research suc

ceeded in transferring mental images (numbers, geo
metrical forms, simple drawings) between two people
(1) in the same room, (2) in different rooms, (3) in dif
ferent towns. From that moment all philosophy based
upon the isolation of the individual mind became ob
solete.

The ecclesiastics of the mechanical philosophy met

this and all evidence of psychical research by the de
mand that no fact of this kind could be accepted until,
as you put it, 'the conditions are known in which it will
certainly recur.' This was an evasion, for psychical facts
belong to mind which never does the same thing in ex
actly the same way twice because all moments of being
are unique. They in fact demanded that the mind should
become mechanism before they would consider its ac
tion.

Answering a reply, he says on March 31, 1926:

My complaint about the claim to 'control' psychic ex

periment is that the men who make the claim want the
living bird to behave like the bird in a Swiss clock. Of
course there are always 'sequences' but those of mind
are not those of mechanism.

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

He began "Sailing to Byzantium" (says Professor A. N.

Jeffares) in September of the same year. Five months
would hardly be enough to forget that a mechanical
songbird was so ridiculous as to make a good weapon
against his materialistic opponents. He must therefore,
in saying he will choose to be reborn as one, imply a
decent modesty about his spiritual condition; critics who
labor to inflate this cuckoo till it sails to Heaven are ex
posing the poet to undeserved distaste.
Not much can be learned from the drafts here, except
that the poem steadily improved.

Or send the dolphins back and carry me

Into the artifice of eternity.
The dolphin's journey done I shall not take
If it must be the dolphin I shall take . . .

seems to have been the version that came immediately

before:

It knows not what it is; and carry me

Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of Nature I shall never take .

These dolphins specifically carry the soul to death, as on

Roman tombs. But he consistently removes them from
this poem, where their effect would be limiting, and in
"Byzantium" he seems to give them the more general
function which they evidently have in "News for the
Delphic Oracle." It would be absurd to allow rejected
variants to prevent a poet from improving on his first
idea.
He had seen mosaics with gold backgrounds, and in
both his sources the tree was made of gold, as well as
the bird:

That the Grecian goldsmiths make . .

And set in golden leaves to sing
Of present past & future & to come
For the instruction of Byzantium.

He thus stumbled upon the Golden Bough, and Mr.

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 GRAND STREET

Stallworthy reports that the handwriting at this point

"quickens and runs boldly":

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

At the emperor's order for his Lady's sake
And set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past or passing, or to come.

The talisman which allowed Aeneas to visit the under

world and return was just what Yeats wanted; and
Aeneas when he is there hears plenty of talk about
reincarnation, with a long-term political prophecy, so
the whole background is very suitable. I think the ac
cident felt like magic, or like having the gods on his
side; only after that can the verse bring into focus its
smooth gaiety and its lilting impudence. It is very far
from fear of death; perhaps he achieves in this last verse
the state of purity or detachment which he prayed so
earnestly for in the second verse.
Both poems present the idea of burning people alive
to purge them, which is appallingly strong and emi
nently Christian; but Yeats reduces it; he turns the saints
into "sages" halfway through the drafts, and the ghostly
dancers on the emperor's pavement derive from the
Noh play Motomezuka. The heroine's sufferings, as Yeats
explained, are imposed by her own mind and are not
said to be deserved: "The priest tells her that if she can
but cease to believe in her punishments they will cease
to exist. She listens in gratitude, but she cannot cease to
believe . . ."; Mr. F.A.C. Wilson (I quote this from his
op. cit., page 241) goes on to say that such flames nat
urally do not need faggots:

they feed on their own dark energy, though they do so

at the discretion of the emperor, whom I take therefore
to be Yeats's symbol for God.

There is not a word to suggest that the emperor is tor

turing these ghosts, except that they choose to do their
purging dance in the palace which he inherits. No doubt
a tenth-century emperor was in fact wicked enough to

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

torture anybody, but Yeats prefers to think of him as

amiable and idle, and how could an emperor torture a
ghost? Mr. Wilson invents his ghastly insertion with easy
confidence, because the only Heaven he can conceive is
the Christian Heaven, where the God who was "satisfied"
by crucifying his son forces his chosen to gloat as he
does eternally in a total realization of the tortures of the
damned. No wonder such critics make the poems feel in
coherent. Yeats probably set off from the Christian hor
rors but drove them steadily into the background of his
world-picture; and the Noh plays, even when dreadful,
evoke a mood of cool tenderness.
The purgation is in any case not chiefly aimed at
removing guilt or divine displeasure. We hear at one
point in A Vision that passionate love is likely to call for
purgation afterwards, but not because it is a sin or be
cause the spirits are too pure for it. Indeed we hear
of a man who was persecuted by his guardian angel
because it fell in love with his sweetheart (maybe some
one punished this angel, but clearly it was not sexless).
Some spirits purge themselves for deeds which hurt their
neighbors, but some for passions which were to their
credit in this world; as when the ghostly hero of a Noh
play repeatedly dances his final battle, though he no
longer owes loyalty to his overlord. Yeats himself, to
judge from his letters, felt he needed purging from
hatred of his old political enemies; he would sooner
have defeated them, but to be a liberated spirit one
must be prepared to start afresh. Thus to desire release
from "complexity," the knotted cords of passion which
tie us to one life-complexity is mentioned three times
as an evil in "Byzantium"-does not imply that Yeats
wanted release from the Wheel, release from rebirth.
When he felt the nuisance of being an old man, he
could hardly wait to be reborn. He accepted the idea of
ultimate release (not to have done that would have been
unorthodox) and here, I think, we find what is so jarring
and tasteless when critics insist that the Byzantium
poems take place in the presence of God. Seeing God's
face, in Christianity, would correspond for Yeats to Nir
vana or release from the Wheel; it would mean not

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 GRAND STREET

returning to this world; and he had decided, and had

given prominence to poems explaining that he had
decided, that for the present he needed to continue,
however painfully, his series of reincarnations around
the phases of the moon.
And yet just before this decision, not a dozen years
before he died, he had said in lines of delicious and
haunting beauty that he had chosen never to be reborn
as any live thing, only as a cuckoo clock or thereabouts.
This is a problem, and fortunately it was observed at the
time (whereas modern critics are content to show by
learned parallels that the built-in tweet-tweet is the
voice of God). Yeats wrote "Byzantium" because Sturge
Moore had told him that "Sailing to Byzantium" ended
badly; at least, that is what he told Sturge Moore, glad
perhaps to have found a way to make him a generous
answer. Moore wrote to Yeats on April 16, 1930 (two
years after the poem had been printed) that the final
verse "let him down" because

such a goldsmith's bird is as much nature as a man's

body, especially if it only sings like Homer and Shake
speare of what is past or passing or to come to Lords
and Ladies.

Homer had said it of the soothsayer Calchas in the Iliad,

and somehow this makes the mild comment more ap
preciative; there was no great need for a defense. Yeats
only recalls it when writing to Moore about the book
plate on October 4:

Yes, I have decided to call the book Byzantium. I en

close the poem from which the name is taken, hoping
that it may suggest symbolism for the cover. The poem
originates from a criticism of yours. You objected to the
last verse of Sailing to Byzantium because a bird made
by a goldsmith was just as natural as anything else.
That showed me that the idea needed exposition.

The book was finally called The Winding Stair, and

the cover has a pinched-looking stair up the center with
ineffective obscurities in four corners. The cover of The

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

Tower even when battered still makes the tower look

brave and the river wet, just as the "Wild Swans at
Coole" continue to fly; if Moore had been allowed the
outline of St. Sophia and a dolphin or two in the Bos
phorus he would have brought off his splendid trick
again. It was a sacrifice, and the reason for it was that
the title of the collection had to draw attention to its
central theme, a quasi-evolutionary struggle; also Yeats
chose to put near the start a dialogue in which, as has
been well said, "he chooses for his soul reincarnation
rather than a resting-place in the artifice of eternity."
Reincarnation thus became increasingly important to
him as basic to the interpretation of "Byzantium."
It is hard to say just what "exposition" Yeats had
given to the idea of the bird by writing the poem;
perhaps he would answer that his treatment had brought
out more of the inherent beauty of the "image," and
that anything so beautiful must adumbrate a truth. He
was quite capable of teasing his correspondent with a
mystery, in a grand manner; and it seems plain that he
could have chosen a more impressive example of the
good which may be done by exalted works of art, if
that was all he had required.
An article by Mr. T. L. Dunne in Modem Language
Notes (1952) appeared to settle the question of the
sources for Yeats's mechanical bird. The Nobel Prize
money let him do various useful things, among them
buying himself a small working library which included
The Cambridge Medieval History and Gibbon's Decline
and Fall-"in a good edition," he wrote to Lady Gregory
(January 13, 1924), so presumably she had told him to
get one. I was pleased to find this in the Letters because
I had argued beforehand that his advisers would regard
Gibbon as more than a history, a major weapon of the
Enlightenment against the priests. Yeats became prone
to boast, falsely no doubt but with a sad kind of truth,
that he had remained ignorant till he could educate
himself out of his Nobel Prize money. Each of these
large books allows a brief passage of somewhat rhe
torical contempt to the mechanical toys of the Emperor
Theophilus; they are plainly the immediate source of

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 GRAND STREET

the bird of Yeats, which gave its first tweet in a poem

written about two years after the massy volumes had
reached his home. That is, he may have heard of it
before, but this reading was what made him use it. Yet
it is hard to see how even so contrary a man as Yeats
could choose to be reborn as such a bird, in the face of
the black scorn of the two surveys.
One reason, of course, was the then recent discovery
of the merits of Byzantine art, a major tributary of the
river in which the mind of Yeats swam. But this does
not go far enough. Exclusively religious, the art was
interrupted for a century by the Iconoclast Movement,
and was different when it re-emerged. Theophilus, reign
ing 829-842, was a fanatical iconoclast, and rebuilt the
palace in imitation of the Moslem splendors of Haroun
Al-Raschid. Even worse, he was the last iconoclast em
peror; when the bird was made, the artworks admired
by Yeats and his friends had been suppressed or fought
over, for a clear century, with the habitual vile cruelty
of the masters of the holy city. The Moslems of course
were iconoclasts too, and I have not been able to learn
about the Bagdad style of animal sculpture. The Cam
bridge Modern History says:

On audience days, when foreign ambassadors entered

the hall, the birds in the plane-trees fluttered and sang,
the griffins sat up on their pedestals, the lions arose,
lashed the air with their tails, and gave forth metallic
roars.

Gibbon is less funny but remarks what a barbarian the

man would have appeared to the Athenians. The taste
of Yeats in visual art has become hard to sympathize
with, but at least his social judgment was alert; as the
toy outraged his whole theoretical position, and both his
books told him it was vulgar, he might naturally have
left it alone.
Indeed, I see only one explanation. He must have
loved such a toy when he was about ten years old, in
1875, before he had developed any crotchets against the
Machine Age. At that time there were very fine speci

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

mens on sale. Maybe he only flattened his nose against

a shop window admiring them, as he wrote about Keats,
but his father was indulgent at the time about a model
yacht for the Round Pond. It does not seem a painful
memory, but the child, not any ghost, may have been
wondering whether it was worthwhile to let oneself
grow up in the world, and this makes more understand
able what the poem tells us, that the answer of the
touchy pet would vary with its moods. When I was
small (born 1906) I was sometimes taken to visit a ven
erable great-aunt, and after tea she would bring out
exquisitely preserved toys of an antiquity rivaling her
own. Chief among them was the bird of Yeats in its
great cage, wound up to sing by a massive key; a darkish
green tree, as I remember, occupied most of the cage,
and a quite small shimmering bird, whose beak would
open and shut while the musical box in the basement
was playing, perched carelessly upon a branch at one
side. The whole affair glittered, but I cannot claim to
have seen the Golden Bough; it was prettier than a gilt
tree would have been; and of course the bird was not
plumb on top of it, like Satan in Paradise. I remember
being struck to hear my mother say, by way of praising
the great age of the toy, that she remembered being
shown it herself when she was a child after such a tea;
and she and Yeats were born in the same year, 1865.
I can raise no visual memory of the ones Queen Victoria
presented to the Empress Dowager, which were on view
in the Summer Palace (the Communists preferred to
show other treasures after a bit), but I remember think
ing they were just like Aunt Lizzie's, only plastered with
semiprecious stones. Considering the date (1873), when
the Empress first sent an envoy to London, hers and
Aunt Lizzie's and Yeats's were probably all made by
the same firm. Such toys were undoubtedly made earlier
(Lord Macartney, in the Journal of his Embassy to
China in 17934, reports embarrassment at finding in the
park at Jehol "orreries, clocks, and musical automatons"
much better then what he had brought-both lots had
been made by the English firm of Ellicott, explains a

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 GRAND STREET

footnote to the 1962 edition); but they had acquired a

special prestige around 1870. They had come to be felt
somehow edifying, or at least poetical in a high-minded
way; many people nowadays, while regarding this senti
ment as quaint and remote, would yet feel that the doll
in Petrouchka is telling some mysterious truth which
half comforts you and half makes you cry. (Whereas
nobody would be tempted in this way by the mechanical
griffins.) Yeats would be familiar with the idea that a
child viewing such a toy is already in Paradise (perhaps
from gaining a sense of magical power also needed by
emperors), though he would not want the idea in his
poem; and I agree that to that extent his Byzantium
represents Paradise.
As to the date of the Byzantium of the poems, we
should realize that after he had bought his history books
he went on mulling over them to fit in the phases of the
moon. In A Vision (1924, first edition) he says he would
like to visit the Byzantium of Justinian, say 500 A.D.,
but the directive for writing Byzantium (1930) en
visages 1000 A.D. The singing bird erected by the last
Iconoclast would no doubt keep its place indefinitely,
so that if the spirit of Yeats came at about the turn of
the century it could see both the bird and the new
mosaics. This would be convenient, as 1000 A.D. in
Yeats's system was a particularly eerie time. He expected
2000 A.D. to end Christianity with a new dispensation,
probably a very unpleasant one; the date halfway
through Christianity would thus be a central rendezvous
for spirits past and to come-the poem might well in
clude a nostalgic and despairing visitor from 2000 A.D.,
as well as an indignant hot-gospeling Early Christian;
but this completeness would seem trivial to Yeats, whose
mind was always on the needs for the next step ahead.
In A Vision, V. 4 (1925), he speaks of the later Byzan
tine mosaics as inferior, mentioning the churches in
Sicily he had seen the year before (later than his writing
for the first edition). I think he means that the mosaics
made after the Iconoclastic break at first recovered the
old stern majesty, but that later ones became human
istic:

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

The return of the images may, as I see things, have been

the failure of synthesis (Phase 22) and the first sink
ing-in and dying-down of Christendom into the hetero
geneous loam. . . . Full moon over, that last Embodi
ment shall grow more like ourselves, putting off that
stern majesty, borrowed, it may be, from the Phidian
Zeus-if we can trust Cefalu and Monreale; and his
Mother-putting off her harsh Byzantine image-stand at
his side.

He goes on to report tales of Popes appointed by ruling

courtesans, and hearing their sighs in the confessional
after exciting their cries of love; "outside a few courts
and monasteries, another book tells me of an Asiatic
and anarchic Europe." By 1000, if I follow his mind, the
city was still keeping anarchy at bay but had become
oppressively autumnal, and already the ghosts were
more distinguished than the living. It was the best time
to choose, if you wanted to meet the ghosts.
I am not sure how to interpret the assumption that
naturalism is bad, and that ill nature is good because
unnatural; the formula confuses at least two different
factors. The Ravenna mosaics (say 500 A.D. ) often com
bine much human or natural charm with their religious
earnestness, whereas the Sicilian ones (say 1000 A.D.)
are very formal or unnatural in line except for the faces,
always of elderly and severe characters, which are often
strikingly lifelike and convincing; they are not spiritual
but ruling-class. Technically, the Ravenna ones are
made of quite large bits of unshaped stone, often with
the mortar or concrete showing between them; and this
unnaturalistic texture gives a shimmer of intense though
eternally fixed vitality-you feel the artist relied on his
luck, so it is not really very different from the effect of a
snapshot. The Sicilian ones give the contours of robe and
cheek smoothly turned edges, evidently the pride of the
technicians but slimy in effect, with pursy sagging
curves. Boris Anrep, who recovered the Ravenna tech
nique and used it for example on the floor of the Na
tional Gallery, lectured on it at Cambridge while I was
a student; he needed only to hint his distaste for the
Sicilian curves and follow them on the magic-lantern

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 GRAND STREET

screen with his pointer to make the audience roar as at

an obscene farce. This would be in the year that "Sail
ing to Byzantium" was written, and Yeats was "in the
movement" about Byzantine art, so the distinction was
probably clear to him. The passage I have quoted is
tiresomely obscure, but probably because he felt un
certain about history, not about art. The Sicilian char
acters are strong enough to control a mob, however
plainly the "abstract forms" of their drapery are elderly
bellies and testicles; and control of a mob is admittedly
one of the themes of "Byzantium."
The spiritual tourist is shocked by the holy city as
soon as he arrives there; his moral taste has not sunk so
low as that of his critics, who mistake it for Paradise.
I claim some credit for recognizing this from the first
three lines of the finished poem:

The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed.
Night's resonance recedes; night-walker's song . . .

I was not found convincing there, but it turns out that

the earlier drafts made the point much more strongly:
"all that roaring rout of rascals," "the emperor's brawl
ing soldiers," "the last benighted robber or assassin fled,"
"the drunken harlot's song." Critics who still insist that
this town is Paradise must be struggling to hush up a
scandal. But Yeats wanted to show that an otherworldly
art had power to handle the harsh forces of the world,
so his picture of the city is wanted, as well as true; and
I suppose he cut it down merely because he needed
severe compression all along.
"Byzantium" has only five verses. In the first, night
falls after the visitor's first day in the city; in the second,
he meets what we learn from his private directive to be
the ghost of a mummy; the third is given up to the bird
and what it can do; in the fourth, still on the emperor's
pavement, the spirits dance their purgation; and the
mysterious fifth celebrates the triumph of the smithies
of the emperor over the flood. Mr. Bradford, in his
final paragraph, says: "Death the summoner, disguised

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

as a walking mummy, calls the souls of the departed to

Paradise"; on his view, the throne of the Emperor, who
is God, is the end of the pilgrimage of these wailing
dead. Hence the bird cannot influence their behavior,
because they are past being influenced when they first
see it. At least, this is so if I am right in believing that
Yeats would regard actually seeing the face of God (an
experience he does not write about) as equivalent to
Nirvana, the end of the process of rebirth. The mummy
would be "Death the summoner" all right, but there
would no longer be any point in the bird.
I used even to disbelieve the idea that the mummy is
meant to act as a guide to Yeats, but here the variants
have convinced me. Mr. Stallworthy says that, by the
third draft of the poem, Yeats

would seem to have conceived the idea of a single

guide, who would lead him through Byzantium as the
Sibyl led Aeneas, and Virgil led Dante. This, presum
ably, is the 'walking mummy' of the first draft.

The third draft has the line "His breathless body moves
and summons me," and a later draft puts "beckons" for
summons; then we have:

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

(May better summon me) Can merrily summon me
To adore . . .

"Merrily" carries a strong suggestion that we have not

heard the whole story. Even without this unnerving de
tail, it would be probable that if we had the science
fiction long-short we would find the mummy at least
giving some gruff directions to the poet. But, even so,
it would be quite unsuitable, and extremely unlike what
happens to Virgil, if this mummy led Yeats into the
presence of God.
Also the interest of Yeats seems to be not in deciding
where the guide would take him to but in considering
the nature of such a guide. Other variants say:

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 GRAND STREET

(Harsh) Death in Life, or that dear Life in Death

Limbs that have been bound in mummy-cloth

Are more content with a winding path

It knows the winding of the path

Mr. Stallworthy says that the stanza "grows round the

nucleus of a Coleridgean image," but Mr. Wilson prob
ably did better by deriving "death-in-life" from a frag
ment of Heraclitus: "Men and gods die each other's life,
live each other's death." Neither reference is much help
here. This mummy has presumably refused rebirth for
at least a thousand years, and Yeats would think of its
existence as like the sordid old age of a man who has
refused to risk a life at the call of duty. Such a state is
readily called "death-in-life," and the desirable "life-in
death" would be becoming an immortal poet, or a toy
which is a reliable entertainer of children, or something
decent like that. But no such distinction is made in the
poem; the visitor "hails" the cynical old mummy with
relief, and addresses him both ways round; anyhow, he
is better worth meeting than those beastly live people
were, during the day.
A final version, after many variants, says:

A mouth that has moisture and no breath

Breathless mouths may summon.

Here I have the unusual satisfaction, after saying that

the merit of a line is inherently to be ambiguous, of
reading evidence that the poet had drafted the meanings
separately and struggled till they were combined. We
get
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Cries out the summons / Can stoutly summon
Can merrily summon me / Can all blood summon

but also

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

Breathing mouths may summon.

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

The ambiguity marks an astute observation of Yeats, on

a problem often quarreled over. Human mouths, breath
less with terror, have raised Mephistopheles; but
Mephistopheles said he hadn't been fetched at all, he
had merely chosen to come and fetch Faustus. The
poetical effect of the ambiguity is a kind of tender mys
tery and awe; but still, "hailing" the vision is hardly the
way Yeats would have received a call to death without
rebirth, whatever the variant "merrily" means; and no
variant says that Yeats obeyed the beckoning of the
mummy, any more than Pope obeyed the beckoning of
the Unfortunate Lady.
Still, though I need to deflate the mummy, I recognize
that it is viewed with awe as a way-finder; not only in a
number of splendid lines which were rejected but in a
grand mystery of the final version:

For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

May unwind the winding path.

The struggle of Yeats for compactness has led him here

to a startling conceit, and as I have had a long disagree
ment with my colleagues about Imagery I enjoy insisting
that they ought to make a picture of this too. Egyptian
mummies were wrapped in a continuous narrow ban
dage of great length, so they actually could be used as
the ball of thread was used by Theseus in the labyrinth
and by Curdie in The Princess and the Goblins. If Yeats
picked this mummy up and twirled it round, he could
leave a line of bandage behind him, and after complet
ing his adventures wind up his way back to daylight.
It seems clear at least that he is not eager for extinction.
But the mummy could be allowed a more active part.
Curdie, when he followed the thread into unknown
depths of the mine to the haunts of the goblins, was
(however magically) being guided; and perhaps this
mummy is a guide who will lay a trail of bandage for
his remote posterity by dancing round as he advances.
I hope I will not be told of some aesthetic reason why I
should close my mind to these Images, as not sufficiently
in the mode; they occupy the only bit of the poem which

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 GRAND STREET

is about The Winding Stair, a conception so important

to the poet that the volume could not be called "Byzan
tium" and the cover design had to be spoilt. The mummy
showed a truth by being bound up, because to liberate
oneself is necessarily a circuitous process. A man so very
entangled, the drafts imply through their excellent
poetry, will probably be an expert in the pedantries of
the next world, good at showing the way.
I expect that this is another case of relying upon
childhood memories, though they are not so badly
needed here as for justifying the clockwork bird. Theseus
and Ariadne, though well known, are not I think a usual
game for children. The Princess and the Goblins by
George Macdonald (1872) was published when Yeats
was seven years old, and became part of the equipment
of every respectable Victorian nursery. One of my
earliest memories is of clutching a candle in my shaking
hand and climbing over heaps of coal as I wound up the
thread left by my sister across the vasty and labyrinthine
cellars of Yokefleet Hall. If the child Yeats had not
played this game too, it is hard to see why the grotesque
conceit rang a bell in him. One would like to have more
story in the poem here. The poet says: "A ghost has
appeared, and I see it is a mummy; not surprisingly,
because all these artificial products of hieratic skills, like
the sages in the mosaics, are artful at finding their way
out of the underworld." Anybody may need to get out
of the underworld, but Yeats in doing this piece of time
travel while yet alive is specially privileged.
When he says that the vision is "more image than a
shade" he perhaps means a little that it is a Symbol,
being a Symbolist himself; but this would get in the way
of the narrative, and the main meaning has to be
"statue"-indeed, a mummy actually is a statue superim
posed upon the shell of a human body. A draft of
"Sailing to Byzantium" says that he hoped to meet there
a statue by Phidias, and probably the idea was still
knocking about in his mind. It would be aesthetically
a bit unnerving to see these two entities stalking past one
another on the magic pavement, and I daresay that
Yeats, when he talked about an "image" but gave only

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

abstract paradoxes, was trying to avoid being too visual

here. All the same, we would expect to meet both of
them in the film of the poem.
The next verse is the mechanical bird, and the drafts
do not give much help; Mr. Stallworthy is evidently
right about a "literary influence," but the poet succeeded
in driving it out. When he wrote

What mind decreed or hammer shaped the metal

he must have been comparing the poor toy to Blake's

tiger, thus making it hard for me to argue that he viewed
the bird with self-deprecating humor. But he would
think of it as like Swift or Joyce, harsh wits who made
cauterizing jokes and were both feared and revered; to
regard a wit as a tiger is typical of the Dublin of the
1890s. Also I do not deny that the bird is allowed a
dignified entry in the last verse, as one of the products
of the Byzantine smithies.
Because reincarnation decided the name of The Wind
ing Stair, when "the cocks of Hades crow" they must be
inciting the spirits to choose to be reborn. But this bird is
said to crow "like" them, therefore is not presented as one
of them; naturally not, because it is in tenth-century
Byzantium. One draft says it

Mutters night long out of a golden bough

What the birds of Hades know.

This adds to its moodiness, which Yeats would regard

as an unmechanical feature, though it is familiar in
many an old car. The final version says it

Can like the cocks of Hades crow,

Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal . . .

That is, it sometimes encourages the ghosts who visit

the city to accept the arduous duty of rebirth; but, in its
blacker and more Swift-like moods, it tells them that
life on earth is not worth returning to. This might an

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 GRAND STREET

swer the question of Sturge Moore; although the artwork

itself was material, its beauty allowed it to influence the
spirits.
Mr. Bradford says that the poems present rather dif
ferent towns; in the town of the second poem:

Unity of Being is threatened, though it is miraculously

restored when the symbolic dolphins carry the souls of
the dead to a Yeatsian paradise of art, art which is at
once sensual and spiritual.

It seems to have become a rule that the effect of saying

"symbolic" is to throw away the story; no poet must any
longer write an allegory-he had already been forbidden
to write a literal story, like Chaucer. At first, I think,
the symbolists despised a story for being exciting; but
here is a case where refusal to attend to the facts
presented makes a poem too much of a thriller. This
miraculous restoration was the permanent state of being
of the holy city, not a trick which a crack corps of
dolphin-riders brought off once. The actual spirits, ar
riving by regular dolphin service for a bit of purging
at Byzantium, dancing on a magic pavement and what
not, were in pretty bad shape and had no idea of rescu
ing or destroying the city.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood

Come the thin shades

The crowds approach; the marble breaks the flood

Shadowy feet upon the floor

Innumerable feet, passion-heavy feet
Intricacy of the dancing floor . . .
Simplicity of the dancing floor
A crowd of spirits

Not exactly Biggles's crowd, swooping in for a rescue,

surely. A reader may well ask "Why then are they sup
posed to have come?" and Yeats I think would answer,
"Well, around 1000, it actually was a very haunted city."
So many vehement generations had expressed them

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

selves in such numinous artworks that the place at

tracted spirits as a corpse does flies. But he also believed
that the city did many of the visiting spirits good, and
felt confident that he would himself win some good
there if he could arrange the trip. We would like to
know many more things about it, for example, what
proportion of these ghosts had living bodies like Yeats,
to which they would return?
Some critic said that when the poet wrote

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea

he meant that "the cathedral bells terrify the population

by foretelling death." I thought this farcically low
minded, but that would not matter, if it explained any
thing about the magical line. The drafts are not much
help, but as before they show the poet laboring to say
two incompatible things, until at last he can say both
at once:

The dolphin-tortured flood breaks into spray

That gong-tormented current breaks in spray in foam

The moral of the dolphin was that it could jump

through the surface of the sea for play, and in the course
of play it had saved the lives of men; it could thus
adventure from one element to another, or even from
an animal to a spiritual world, and yet safely return.
Yeats too wanted to get back, and felt the charm of the
dolphins on the Roman tombstones. The truth is that
the classical authors were talking in a confusion between
two creatures called dolphin, a small whale and a fish,
and could not be bothered to distinguish them (no
symbolism I hope need be attached to this merely sordid
mental condition). The breaking of the surface between
two media really is, however, a major theme of "Byzan
tium," and it is in key with this to have the verses pre
sented each as a separate rough diamond. The gong
makes everything shake, even the surface of the sea; the
holy noise shakes it from above as the dolphin does
from below. The cathedral bells continually recall to

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 GRAND STREET

the population that they ought to engage in more spir

itual activity, but this does not mean exciting terror by
threatening immediate death. The wonderful line is
rather weak on symbolism, but at least it does little to
encourage holy terror.
I hope it is understood, though it never seems to be
said, that break is given a technical sense when "the
smithies break the flood" and "marbles of the dancing
floor/Break bitter furies." A breakwater does not fight
directly but diverts the waves so that their strength is
exercised harmlessly (or, at least, modern ones do). A
direct way to fight sexual passion would be to lock up
all the young people in monasteries and nunneries; to
provide a ballroom is quite different.
Finally, I have to admit that the symbolist method
prevents one from interpreting the poem fully as a sci
ence fiction narrative; but I maintain that the effort is
still worth pushing as far as it will go, because the sym
bolic resistance is only met at a fairly deep level. The
ghosts are the same as the sea on which they ride, liable
to "flood" the city unless coped with by breakwaters,
and therefore the same as the disruptive passions of the
living inhabitants of the city, which would also over
whelm it if not countered by its supreme artworks. The
doctrine of rebirth gave ghosts a status rather inferior
to that of men, so the ambition of Yeats in choosing to
be reborn as an artwork could not be satisfied by merely
having a good influence on ghosts. The smithies too
must also keep at bay the evil of the human inhabitants
of the city; but the poem does not say so, and indeed
would have no time to, because of the magical compres
sion of its technique. The mysterious triumph of the last
verse, holding disaster forever at bay as by the routine
of a juggler, may well seem an answer to the objection
of Sturge Moore, even if only shouted by an unknown
authority down a corridor in a dream. "In the medium
istic condition," said Yeats (A Vision III. 8), "it some
times seems as if dreams awoke and yet remained
dreams." On some such ground, I suppose, one might
even admit the presence of the Christian God the
Father, though he must not expect to start indulging

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 WILLIAM EMPSON

himself in his unpleasing personal habits as soon as he

gets through the door. In any case, I think, the poem
feels much better if one takes a waking interest in its
story; there is no need to say that its merit resides in
the confusion at a deep level which seems to be inherent
in symbolist technique.

GRAND STREET
Numbers 1, 2 and 3 are available. No. 1 contains
the Paris 1938 Diaries of Glenway Wescott and
"Looking for Work" by Alice Munro, as well as
contributions from Ted Hughes, W. S. Merwin,
James Salter, Penelope Gilliatt, and Northrop
Frye. No. 2 contains "Paradise Pond" by Sylvia
Plath and "Spying in Spain and Elsewhere" by
Claud Cockbum, as well as contributions from
Richard Howard, D. M. Thomas, Bernard Knox,
Nora Sayre, and Christopher Ricks. No. 3 con
tains "Sylvia Plath and Her Journals" by Ted
Hughes and "The Baboon in the Night Club" by
Kenneth Bernard, as well as contributions from
Alfred Corn, Djuna Barnes, Alice Munro, Laura
(Riding) Jackson, and Czeslaw Milosz. To order,
please check the appropriate box on the subscrip
tion form enclosed or send $4 for each to GRAND
STREET, 50 Riverside Drive, New York, N.Y.
10024.

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