The way I understand "Sailing to Byzantium," the speaker is leaving a land
where everyone is into sensual, natural pleasures and is traveling toward a
place (Byzantium) where everyday life contains made-things, artifice,
aesthetics. What he really cares about is not just the art itself, but the
actualizing process of making it - singing, beating gold. He wants to be
the thing becoming- the work of art in process - the singer of "what is
past, or passing, or to come." It seems to me this is almost the identical
point in the last stanza of "Among School Children."
But I do see your point, Paul, in that he wants to leave nature, even to
abandon the body. Seems like, in "Among School Children," he's using bodies
as signs, thinking devices for getting at time/process. (Though I don't
think he's accepting materiality.) In "Sailing to Byzantium," maybe he's
approaching the problem of his aging body differently, this time as
something to be escaped. Also, I'm not sure if he's talking literally about
reincarnation when he says "once out of nature," but I wouldn't be
surprised. Anyway, they're just different poems, with different moments of
feeling as their genesis, so we probably can't expect them to be
theoretically consistent with each other.
----------------------------
Randy Bomer
Language Education
Indiana University
201 N. Rose Ave.
Bloomington, IN 47405
(812) 856-8293
> From: "Paul H.Dillon" <illonph@pacbell.net>
> I'm wondering what you think of the contrast between Yeat's position in
> "Among School Children", where he seems to accept in some way mortality and
> aging, the transient joy of mother in the babe that will grow old, the
> apparent renouncing of the platonic ideal realm, with the position taken in
> "Sailing to Byzantium" where he wrote:
>
> "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."
>
> This really struck me, especially since the images given earlier in this
> poem clearly resemble those of "Among School Children" as in:
>
> "An aged man is but a paltry thing,
> A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
> Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
> For every tatter in its mortal dress,
> Nor is there singing school but studying
> Monuments of its own magnificence."
>
> There is an interesting annotation to "Among School Children" from a
> collection of English literature i got at a garage sale ($0.50/volume) that
> adds to this issue of mortal v. timeless pleasures:
>
> Begin quote
>
> "yeats has explained in a note that the phrase 'honey of generation' was
> taken from Porphyry's essay on "The Cave of the Nymphs" but he adds, " [I]
> find no warrant in Porphyry for consideriing it the 'drug' that destroys the
> 'recollection of prenatal freedom' . . ." In his essay on "Shelley's
> Poetry" (Essays by W.B. Yeats, especially p. 102) Yeats explains that for
> Porphyry, as for other of the ancients, "honey was the symbol . . for
> 'pleasure arising from generation,' the pleasure which had betrayed the
> infant on her lap from the pre-natal world of non-existence to the world of
> life."
>
> End quote
>
> Paul H. Dillon
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Mike Cole <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>
> To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Sunday, August 13, 2000 4:28 PM
> Subject: yeats again
>
>
>>
>> thanks very much Jay and Randi. your readings each helped me different
>> ways.
>>
>> Jay got me thinking about myself in relation to aging and interacting
>> with people. Moving from middle to old age is a process no less confusing
>> than entering adolescence or going to school for the first time. Kundera
>> put it beautifully:
>>
>> we leave chilhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without
>> knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age,
>> we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent
>> children of their old age. In that sense, human's world is a planet
>> of inexperience.
>>
>> Its wierd being treated as old. But more about that and Randi's reading
>> of Among Children later..... guests at the door (better than this
>> morning when it was, literally, a coyote at the door!)
>> mike
>>
>
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