Byzantium

Commentary:

Yeats starts out with the image of a falcon wheeling

about in the sky, far away from the falconer who

released it. The bird continues to wheel and gyre

further and further away from the falconer. This

metaphor stands for the young people who have given up

the standards of their parents and grandparents for

the new art, the new literature, the new music, and

the other novelties of Yeats' time. The poem was

composed in 1920.

There is another interpretation of the falcon-falconer

image, and that is the image of the head or intellect

as the falcon and the rest of the body and the body

sensations and feelings (heart) as the falconer.

This idea is reinforced and repeated later in the

poem when Yeats brings in the image of the Sphinx,

which is a re-connection of these two components. In

the image of the Sphinx, the head-intellect is

connected to the body. That is the Sphinx isn't

broken apart. The giant sculpture is still intact.

The last two lines of the first stanza are simply a

commentary on the times. Yeats says "The best lack

all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate

intensity." This also suggests a dissociation between

the best, which Yeats identifies as head people, the

intellectuals, and the worst, whom Yeats associates

with the mob who are those who react with passionate

intensity not with careful intellectual study and

expression.

In the first stanza of the poem Yeats gives us the

first bird metaphor. In the second part of the poem

Yeats gives us the second bird metaphor in the form of

"indignant desert birds." These creatures appear to

have been roosting on the Sphinx, but when the massive

beast began to move its "slow thighs" the birds became

agitated and took off. The poet shows us the image a

little later. The birds are flying around above the

slowly moving Sphinx.

At the start of the second stanza Yeats calls for a

revelation, saying "Surely a revelation is at hand."

And Yeats himself becomes the revelator. Yeats is a

revelator because he gives us a powerful image for The

Second Coming. This is the image of a "rough beast"

which has the head-intellect of a man and the fierce

emotions and body intelligence of a beast.

Furthermore, Yeats suggests that the body movement of

the beast, the "slouching" movement is what is moving

the Christ closer and closer to its "Bethlehem" or

birthplace. Yeats adds the image of the

head-intellect connected to the body-mind of a beast

to the image Isaiah gave as a little child for The

Messiah. This makes Yeats a modern revelator or

prophet.

It's significant that Yeats describes the Sphinx as "A

gaze blank and pitiless as the sun," because spiritual

masters are known to gaze blankly as they transmit

"the message" to their disciples. Yeats equates this

gaze and this transmission with the Sphinx, which he

also uses to denote the Second Coming of Christ.

After Yeats presents this brilliant visionary image,

he says "The darkness drops again." His vision ends

and he starts thinking again. He concludes that

"twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to

nightmare by a rocking cradle." This