The microcosm of personal history mirrored in the macrocosm of the world

Written in 1926, “Sailing to Byzantium,” the first poem in Yeats’s 1928 col­lection The Tower, is one of his most famous lyrics. Critics writing on the poem have perceived Byzantium as, variously, a representation of the imagi­nation, the imaginative act, the soul, vision, and Unity of Being.1 It has also consistently been interpreted as the source and the symbol of supremely beau­tiful and enduring artifacts. The poem’s major and most obvious theme cen­ters on the contrast between that which decays and ultimately perishes (the human body) and that which is unchangeable and permanent (aesthetic arti­facts). The following comments represent customary interpretations of these polarities identified in the poem.
The poem’s major and most obvious theme cen­ters on the contrast between that which decays and ultimately perishes (the human body) and that which is unchangeable and permanent (aesthetic arti­facts).
Yeats’s imagery and ideas for “Sailing to Byzantium” surely were influ­enced by his personal identification with the age of Justinian, an empire which Yeats, in a continuation of the musings on Byzantium quoted above, described as his ideal society, one in which “maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one” (279). However, if one reflects on the eventual fate of Justinian’s empire, and, by extension, the arti­facts representative of it, then it would seem that a deep vein of irony has been missed in previous criticism of the poem. In a recently published historical account, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (2004), Jonathan Phillips describes the ultimate fate, in the thirteenth century, of the aesthetic products of Justinian’s reign: The Church of the Holy Apostles contained a mausoleum holding the tombs of some of the great Byzantine emperors of the past, including Justinian. Not content with pillaging all the church’s ornaments and chalices, the crusaders...

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