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Yeats's Byzantium Poems: A Study of Their Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Curtis Bradford
Curtis Bradford*
Affiliation:
Grinnell College, Iowa
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Extract

Yeats's interest in Byzantine art and civilization began in the Nineties and continued through his life. The first issue of “Rosa Alchemica” (1896) refers to the mosaic work at Ravenna (“mosaic not less beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe beauty”), work which Yeats probably saw when in 1907 he travelled in Italy with Lady Gregory. Unfortunately, Yeats has left us no account of his visit to Ravenna. A revision of “The Holy Places,” final section of Discoveries, made for the 1912 edition of The Culling of an Agate, shows that between 1906 and 1912 Yeats's knowledge of Byzantine history had increased. In 1906 he wrote of “an unstable equilibrium of the whole European mind that would not have come had Constantinople wall been built of better stone;” in 1912 this became “had John Palaeologus cherished, despite that high and heady look … a hearty disposition to fight the Turk.” In preparation for the “Dove or Swan” section of A Vision, which Yeats wrote at Capri in February 1925, and left virtually unchanged in the revised Vision of 1937, Yeats read several books about Byzantine art and civilization and studied Byzantine mosaics in Rome and Sicily. He did not return to Ravenna, being fearful of its miasmal air. Once Byzantium had found a place in “the System,” it shortly appeared in the poetry, first in “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Wisdom” (1926-27); then changed, though not utterly, in “Byzantium” (1930).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , March 1960 , pp. 110 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 The reference to “Byzantine mosaic” in the final text of “Rosa Alchemica” (Early Poems and Stories, New York, 1925, p. 467) is not to be found in the first edition (The Secret Rose, London, 1897, p. 244). Yeats added the reference while revising “Rosa Alchemica” for Early Poems and Stories. All manuscript material used is in the collection of Mrs. W. B. Yeats. Quotations are made with her permission. There are microfilm copies of all these MSS except the 1930 Diary and the radio broadcasts at the Houghton Library. The readers assigned to this essay by the Editor of PMLA made many suggestions for revising it. Mr. Donald Davie wrote a helpful commentary on my paper. Copyright by Curtis B. Bradford and Mrs. W. B. Yeats.

2 The following books about Byzantium are in Yeats's library: O. M. Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology; W. G. Holmes, The Age of Justinian and Theodora, Vol. i; Mrs. Arthur Strong, Apotheosis and After Life; Josef Strzygowski, Origin of Christian Church Art (trans, by Dalton and Braun-holtz). Yeats annotated only the Holmes, and of Holmes only the first chapter “Constantinople in the Sixth Century,” an elaborate reconstructive description of Byzantium in Justinian's time. Nearly every page of this chapter was marked. Yeats could not have derived his favorable opinion of Byzantine culture from Holmes, whose attitude toward his subject is both condescending and unfriendly. Yeats also collected reproductions of Byzantine mosaics.

3 Letters (London, 1954), pp. 730–731. In dating this letter, Allan Wade supplied the year, 1927. I think the letter was written in 1926. It will fit with the 1926 letters between the letters of 24 September and 7 December (pp. 718–719); the first complete TS of “Sailing to Byzantium,” quoted below, is dated in Yeats's hand 26 September 1926. In October 1927, after “Sailing to Byzantium” had been printed in October Blast, Yeats would not have written that he had “just finished” it. If I am right about the date of this letter, the poem was then far from being the poem we know; it was in the state found in the revised typescript of “Towards Byzantium.”

4 Norman Jeffares gives an eclectic version of this typescript in RES, January 1946. My versions are progressive. I print first the typed words, then, below, Yeats's revisions. These revisions, including the date, are all in Yeats's hand. There are two copies of this typescript. WBY worked on the first pages of both copies, that is on stanzas I and n, but on only one copy of page 2, that is stanzas in and iv. I transcribe the first page that has the latest revisions and the revised second page.

5 Yeats had rather frequently to reduce the amount of Irish allusion in his works. In the scenario and early drafts of The King of the Great Clock Tower, for instance, the King is O'Rourke of Breifny whose grandfather had married Dervorgilla. The excision of O'Rourke helped to make the myth Yeats was writing universal.

6 G. B. Saul notes (Prolegomena, Philadelphia, 1957, p. 123) that L. A. G. Strong commented on this allusion in Personal Remarks (New York, 1953), p. 32.

7 In revising “The Two Trees” for Selected Poems, 1929, Yeats introduced “gyring” into line IS. I think the change was suggested to him by the phrase “circle of our life” in the original:

There, through bewildered branches, go
Winged Loves borne on in gentle strife,
Tossing and tossing to and fro
The flaming circle of our life.
Countess Kathleen through Poems, 1929
There the Loves—a circle—go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Selected Poems, 1929

Yeats identifies the gyre with the winding stair, always, I think, emblematic of the historical cycle, in his letter to Sturge Moore, 26 Sept. [1930]. (Correspondence, p. 163).

8 Throughout the drafts, and in the Cuala Press Words for Music, the spelling “distains” is found. Yeats would not have distinguished disdains/distains in pronunciation, according to Mrs. Yeats, and she regards “distains” as a misspelling that got into print because the Cuala Press set from Yeats's MS. Whether Yeats corrected “distains” to “disdains” or changed “distains” to “disdains,” it seems certain that he and no other introduced the present reading in Macmillan's The Winding Stair. The Variorum Edition shows that the texts of poems included in Words for Music were very carefully corrected for the Macmillan book. No one but Yeats could have done this correcting.

9 Marion Witt discussed this stanza in “The Making of an Elegy,” MP, XLviii (November 1950), pp. 115–116. Frank Kermode in Romantic Image (London, 1957), pp. 38–40, notes that Yeats borrowed the stanza from Cowley's “Ode on the Death of Mr. William Harvey.”