Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? Sept. 1923 1924, 1928
1. In Greek mythology the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, raped Leda, a mortal. Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux were the children of this union. Yeats saw Leda's rape as the beginning of a new age, analogous with the dove's annunciation to Mary of Jesus' conception: 'I imagine the annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda, remembering that they showed in a Spartan temple, strung up to the roof as a holy relic, an unhatched egg of hers, and that from one of her eggs came love and from the other war' (A Vision). For the author's revisions while composing the poem, see 'Poems in Process,' in the appendices to this volume.
2. I.e., the destruction of Troy, caused by Helen's abduction by Paris. Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army that besieged Troy, was murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, the other daughter of Leda and the swan.
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204 0 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Sailing to Byzantium1
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, ?Those dying generations?at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, 5 Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. 2 An aged man is but a paltry thing, 10 A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing,2 and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; is And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. 3 ; O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall,3 Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,4 20 And be the singing-masters of my soul. 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. 4 25 Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;5 30 Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. Sept. 1926 1927
1. Yeats wrote in A Vision: 'I think that if I could of individual design, absorbed in their subject- be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend matter and that the vision of a whole people.' it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium 2. The poet William Blake (1757-1827) saw the [now Istanbul] a little before Justinian opened St. soul of his dead brother rising to heaven, 'clapping Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato [in the his hands for joy.' 6th century c.e.]. .. . I think that in early Byzan-3. The mosaics in San Apollinaire Nuovo, in tium, maybe never before or since in recorded his-Ravenna, Italy, depict rows of Christian saints on tory, religious, aesthetic and practical life were a gold background; Yeats saw them in 1907. one, that architect and artificers . . . spoke to 4. I.e., whirl in a spiral. the multitude and the few alike. The painter, the 5. I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and illuminator of sacred books, were almost imper-silver, and artificial birds that sang [Yeats's note]. sonal, almost perhaps without the consciousness
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AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN / 2041
Among School Children
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher0 and to sing, do arithmetic To study reading-books and history,
5 To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way?the children's eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man.1
2
I dream of a Ledaean2 body, bent
10 Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy? Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
is Or else, to alter Plato's parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell.'
3 And thinking of that fit of grief or rage I look upon one child or t'other there And wonder if she stood so at that age?
20 For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler's heritage? And had that colour upon cheek or hair, And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before me as a living child.
4
25 Her present image floats into the mind? Did Quattrocento4 finger fashion it Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind And took a mess of shadows for its meat? And I though never of Ledaean kind
30 Had pretty plumage once?enough of that, Better to smile on all that smile, and show There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
5 What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed,
35 And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape As recollection or the drug decide,5
1. Yeats, as part of his work in the Irish Senate, and white); the resulting two beings come together visited a Montessori school in Waterford in 1926. in love to become one again. 2. A hody like Leda's. Yeats associated her daugh-4. I.e., the skill of a 15th-century Italian painter. ter, Helen of Troy, with Maud Gonne. 5. 1 have taken the 'honey of generation' from 3. In the Symposium, by the Greek philosopher Porphyry's essay on 'The Cave of Nymphs' [Yeats's Plato (ca. 428?ca. 348 b.c.e.), Aristophanesargues note]. Porphyry (ca. 234?ca. 305 c.e.) was a Neothat 'the primeval man' was both male and female platonic philosopher. but was divided (like an egg separated into yoke
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2042 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
40Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth? 6 45Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;6 Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings;7 World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras8 Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old
