Critical Essay | Critical Essay by A. Norman Jeffares

Critical Essay by A. Norman Jeffares

SOURCE: “The Byzantine Poems of W. B. Yeats,” in Review of English Studies, Vol. 22, No. 85, January, 1946, pp. 49-52.

In the following essay, Jeffares surveys possible influences on Yeats and “Sailing to Byzantium.”

In his notes to Collected Poems¹ Yeats wrote that he had warmed himself back into life by writing ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Veronica's Napkin’. The date for the poem's first emergence on to paper is given by an entry in the poet's 1930 Diary, recently published by the Cuala Press. This entry, dated 30 April, runs:

Subject for a poem … Describe Byzantium as it is in the system towards the end of the first Christian millenium. A walking mummy, flames at the street corners where the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees, in the harbour offering their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry them to Paradise. These...
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