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W. B. Yeats, Byzantium and the Mediterranean

J. B. Bullen

Yeats’s poetry and prose is infused with the myths, the legends and the history of the
Mediterranean, yet as a young man he never travelled there. His first journey was not
made until 1907 when, at the age of forty-two, he visited Italy with Lady Gregory
and her son, and his second came in 1924 when he went to Sicily with his wife. On
both occasions he visited Byzantine sites,1 and of all the images that Yeats draws
from Mediterranean sources, it is Byzantium that is best-remembered and best
known. The two famous poems ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (composed in 1926) and
‘Byzantium’ (composed in 1930) are alembics within Yeats’s work, distilling his
life-long preoccupations with human old age, the mutability of nature, and the
eternity of art. As D.J. Gordon and I. Fletcher put it, these poems served to sum up
for several generations an idea of Byzantium and its culture. “His crystallisation,”
they said “has become one of the meanings of Byzantium” (Gordon and Fletcher
1961: 86). Yet Yeats was writing towards the end of a romantic phase in the
historiography of Byzantium. It was one that had begun with Ruskin’s encomium for
San Marco Venice in mid century, and culminated in the Art & Crafts movement and
the building of Westminster Cathedral at the end (See Bullen 2003: pp. 106-185).
But even while Yeats was writing, professional historians were annexing Byzantium,
the discipline of Byzantine studies was coming into existence, and romance was
fading.

In this way, Yeats was tapping into long established myths about
Byzantium and informing them with a powerful spirit of his own. The two poems,
therefore, have dimensions that are both public and private. On the one hand they
communicate ideas and emotions about orientalism that were not uncommon in the
second decade of the twentieth century, while on the other they express sentiments
that were personal to him alone. In this way Byzantium was among the private myths
which Yeats used, as Massimo Bacigalupo correctly claims, “to reflect upon the
falling apart of the world” as he knew it (Bacigalupo 2000: 44).

Yeats’s interest in Byzantium was not confined to the 1920s, however,

and its presence can be felt throughout his writing life more, perhaps as a shadow
than a substance. As he conceived it, it is less a place with a specific geographic
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location than an idea or a congeries of feeling. It is a spot where he never set foot,
but one to which he often mentally aspired. Perhaps for this reason Byzantium is
often associated in his mind with movement, with travel, with voyaging, or with
sailing, and it is this journey that I wish to pursue here, tracing something of his
trajectory towards and away from the ancient capital.2

One of the most important stages in that journey began on 14 November

1923 in Merrion Square, Dublin (Foster 1997: 245). Yeats and his young wife,
Georgie Hyde were thinking about going to bed when the telephone rang. Yeats was
58 years old, a recently appointed senator in the recently formed government of the
Irish Free State. In the somewhat chaotic condition of Irish politics, Yeats was
concerned with cultural issues. He was preoccupied with the place of Ireland in
European history, about the part played by Irish legend in Irish art and about the
future of Irish culture. Two issues in particular dominated his thinking. The first was
the status of the Irish National Theatre, and the second was with the health of the
Irish National Gallery in Dublin.

His private life was also in a critical state. Six years previously he had
married Georgie Hyde who was then only twenty-five years old, and now in middle
age Yeats, with high blood pressure and indifferent health, was feeling the weight of
his years. He was in a reflective, introspective phase. He was engaged with writing A
Vision in a mood, as he put it, “between spiritual excitement and sexual torture and
the knowledge that they are somehow inseparable” (Quoted in Jeffares 1984: 215),
and when the telephone rang in Merrion Square it was to announce a significant
event in his personal Byzantine voyage. It came from the editor of the Irish Times
ringing to tell Yeats that he had won the Nobel Prize for literature. He had not
expected this. In the face of stiff competition from Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy
the Swedish committee had awarded him the considerable sum of £7,500 (or
€300,000 at today’s value) together with an invitation to Stockholm in December of
that year to attend the honours ceremony. Yeats agreed to go, travelling with Georgie
first to London, and then to Harwich; on 6 December he boarded a Danish boat that
sailed eastward to Copenhagen and then on to Stockholm. Since the weather was
clement and the sea unusually calm, the couple hugely enjoyed the trip, and as Mrs
Yeats told John Stallworthy, Yeats spent much time in conversation with the Danish
mariners (Stallworthy 1963: 96).
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When the couple arrived in Stockholm Yeats was overwhelmed

by his reception. He was treated like a god by the Nobel committee and as an equal
by the Royal Family. The latter seemed to him to be a mixture of sophistication and
culture, and to have helped created a Swedish society that was a modern meritocracy
rather than an outworn aristocracy. “Sweden,” he wrote, “has achieved more than we
have hoped for in our own country. I think most of all, perhaps, of that splendid
spectacle of your Court, a family beloved and able that has gathered about it not the
rank only but the intellect of its country” (Yeats 1977: 418). But the journey to
Stockholm had for Yeats strong personal implications. The experience of winning
such a prestigious international award created in him a sense of euphoria where he
was extremely receptive to everything around him. He was moved by the dignity of
the honours ceremony, by the regal processions, but above all he was amazed by his
first experience of Swedish art and craft and in particular by his visit to the recently
opened Stockholm town hall. This building and all it contained, said Yeats, was “the
greatest work of Swedish art, a masterwork of the Romantic movement…” (Yeats
1977, 406) The stadhuis was certainly an impressive building as it stood proudly
overlooking Lake Mälaren. It had been some ten years in the making and it is not
difficult to see how it seemed to Yeats to resolve in one gesture many of issues with
he had been grappling recently back in Ireland. It was a collective enterprise,
centrally funded, and acting as a kind of showcase for Swedish arts and crafts using
the vehicle of Swedish history and legend. A writer in the Studio spoke of how
“during the process of building, workshops for modelling, art smith’s work,
coppersmith’s work furniture and textiles … were all under the supervision of the
architect’ (Anon. 1925: 205). The architect in question was Ragner Östberg (1866-
1945). He was the same age as Yeats, and made a deep impression on the poet who
treated him with great generosity when he came to Dublin three years later in 1926.3
For the town hall Östberg had chosen an eclectic style, but one which was
dominantly neo-Byzantine, and once inside Yeats might well have felt that he had
indeed come “to the Holy city of Byzantium” (Yeats 1973: 217).

Immediately behind the main entrance there is what appears to be an

open Mediterranean courtyard comprising colonnades supported by Byzantine
cushioned capitals, but all roofed over as protection against the Swedish climate.
Inside the building cavernous rooms with large wall spaces are broken with round-
arched fenestration where the architect made provision for the all-important frescoes
and mosaics. It was these decorations that most impressed Yeats and particularly the
collective nature of their production. The town hall, he claimed was “the organizing
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centre … for an art imaginative and amazing” (Yeats 1977: 406), a centre which
combined decorative work with fine art to produce a living emblem of what he called
elsewhere “unity of culture”. It had, he wrote, been “decorated by many artists,
working in harmony with one another and with the design of the building as a whole,
and yet all in seeming perfect freedom” (Yeats1977, 407). The Royal Family had
been hugely supportive and one of its members, Prince Eugene, Duke of Nerike, a
painter, worked for two years alongside the other artists and on completion of the
project was photographed (as Yeats himself pointed out: Yeats 1977: 395), not with
other members of the family, but in the company of his fellow artists.

The highlight of Yeats’s visit to the town hall, however, was the so-called
“Golden Room”, a long chamber decorated from end to end with mosaics. These
were designed by a young artist, Einer Forseth (1892-1988). He had worked
historically with subjects chosen from Swedish myth and legend to create what
appeared to Yeats to be a secular cathedral of benevolent nationalism. “All that
multitude and unity,” said Yeats, “could hardly have been possible, had not love of
Stockholm and belief in its future so filled men of different minds, classes, and
occupations that they almost attained the supreme miracle, the dream that has
haunted all religions, and loved one another” (Yeats1977: 407). Moving from the
ancient Swedish past to the modern Swedish present, it was as if a young man had
broken away from the “sensual music” of contemporary art and had managed to
create series of “monuments of unageing intellect” which reached its climax on the
north wall. Here there is a grand Deisis in the Byzantine manner, with one major
difference. Instead of the traditional image of God the Father Forseth has represented
a regal female [Fig. 1]. She is Stockholm herself, the Queen of the Mälaren. She
wears Byzantine sandals, sits in a Byzantine throne and hold in her hands the
Byzantine sceptre and crown. In her lap lies what appears to be an ancient Byzantine
church, but on closer inspection turns out to be the modern Stockholm town hall.
From left and right she receives homage but not from the saints of traditional mosaic.
Instead, Forseth has depicted emblems of countries from the New World in the West
and the old one in the East. The West is represented by America with its skyscrapers
and Statue of Liberty, and by France with the Eiffel Tower; the East is represented
by the Turkish flag, and by an outline of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The old
and the new come together in a striking form of romantic archaising carrying the
mind, as Yeats put it “backward to Byzantium” (Yeats 1977: 406).
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Some lines written for “Sailing to Byzantium” but later removed, suggest
that this moment in the town hall was a critical one in the composition of the
Byzantine poems. They run:

This Danish merchant on a relic swears

That he will be
All that afflicts me, but this merchant swears
To bear me eastward to Byzantium

But now these pleasant dark skinned mariners

Carry Bear
Carry me toward that great Byzantium (Stallworthy 1963: 95).

It was the Danish seamen who carried Yeats to the new Byzantium of
Ragner Östberg, and it was the mosaics of Einer Forseth that “carried” him back to
ideas stored in his mind about the old Byzantium. But what did “Byzantium” mean
to Yeats as he stood in Stockholm town hall in 1923? To answer that we have to
travel backward into Yeats’s own past, back to his time as a young man of twenty-
two when, in 1887, he came to live in Bedford Park, London, and struck up a
friendship with someone he called “the most many-sided man of our times … a man
of genius” (Yeats 1970-75: 183). This was William Morris, 1910a: 7), and in the
1880s Morris had become passionately interested in Byzantium.

For reasons probably connected with his interest in the “Eastern

Question” and the threat of a Russo-Turkish was in the mide-1870s, Morris’s
attention had been drawn to Constantinople and Hagia Sophia. In 1878 he asked a
Greek friend, Aglaia Coronio, tosend him photographs of the building and told his
daughter that he had been “reading a lot about the Byzantine Empire” (Morris 1984-
96: 463). In the previous year he described Byzantium as “rich and fruitful” (1910a:
7), singling out Hagia Sophia as “lovely and stately” (Morris1910b: 78) and the
“most beautiful” European building, after which “the earth began to blossom with
beautiful buildings.” (Morris 1910e: 208). One of those buildings was, of course, San
Marco (which Yeats was to see in 1907), and in November 1879 Morris
corresponded with Ruskin to protest against the damage that was being done to the
building through its restoration. But Morris’s understanding of Byzantine art and
culture was much broader than Ruskin’s, and in the 1880s the city of Constantinople,
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and Hagia Sophia in particular, became central to Morris’s thinking about the
relationship between art and society. For Morris, Gothic art was the true art of the
modern period, and Byzantine art was its earliest manifestation. It was, he said, ‘new
born’ out of the decadence of Greece and Rome (Morris 1910c: 185).

Morris’s first extended account of Byzantium came in his 1882 lecture,

“History of Pattern Designing”. In this, he illustrated the rise and fall of modern
organic art by reference to three buildings, the palace of Diocletian at Spalato, St
Peter’s in Rome, and Hagia Sophia. The first, he says, is encumbered by outworn
classicism, the second by “pedantry and hopelessness”, but in Hagia Sophia organic
art “has utterly thrown aside all pedantic encumbrances” and is “the most beautiful
… of the buildings raised in Europe before the nineteenth century” (Morris 1910c:
207-8). Hagia Sophia continued to be a measure for Morris of the greatness of
Byzantine art. In 1889 when Yeats was closest to Morris he several times gave a
lecture entitled “Gothic Architecture” .4 There can be no doubt that Yeats absorbed
this most elaborate account of the importance of Byzantine art and culture in which
Morris pointed to the “freedom” of the human spirit in breaking the deadly grip of
classicism. “The first expression of this freedom”, he wrote, “is called Byzantine Art,
and there is nothing to object to in the name. For centuries Byzantium was the centre
of it and its first great work [Hagia Sophia] remains its greatest work. The style leaps
into completion in this most lovely building” (Morris 1936: 273-4).

Morris romanticized Byzantium stressing its democratic spirit, social

unity, and equality. “Who built Hagia Sophia?” he asks. The answer is: “men like
you and me, handicraftsmen who left no names behind them” (Morris1910a: 6-7).
The essential characteristic of Byzantine art, he said in another lecture from 1881
was that it was “the work of collective rather than individual genius” (Morris 1910:
159) and just as it united architect and craftsman, it drew together East and West in a
richly synthesizing process. Byzantium constituted “a kind of knot to all the many
thrums of the first days of modern Europe” (Morris 1910e: 229). It gathered together
the arts of India, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia, Asia Minor and Egypt, which it
“mingled” with the older arts of Greece, and it joined, too, Eastern love of freedom,
mystery and intricate design with Western respect for discipline, structure and fact.
“It is the living child and fruitful mother of art, past and future’ (Morris 1910e: 208).

Morris’s dithyrambic, historically panoramic account of Byzantine

architecture was most persuasively expressed in “Gothic Architecture”. Its structure
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owes much to Ruskin’s famous chapter “Nature of Gothic” in his Stones of Venice,
but Ruskin’s version of Byzantium began and ended in Venice; Morris, however,
taking the hint from later archaeological work gave Byzantine architecture a far
wider significance in the history of European culture. With Ruskin’s brilliant aerial
journey across Europe in his, Morris creates a similar cultural map that extends to
Scandinavia in one direction and the Near East in the other but with Byzantium as its
centre. In the early days architecture, he wrote, “met with traditions drawn from
many sources. In Syria, the borderland of so many races and customs, the East
mingled with the West, and Byzantine art was born. Its characteristics are simplicity
of structure and outline of mass; amazing delicacy of ornament combined with
abhorrence of vagueness: it is bright and clear in colour, pure in line, hating
barrenness as much as vagueness; redundant, but not florid, the very opposite of
Roman architecture in spirit, though it took so many of its forms and revivified them.
Nothing more beautiful than its best works has ever been produced by man, but in
spite of its stately loveliness and quietude, it was the mother of fierce vigour in the
days to come, for from its first days in St Sophia, Gothic architecture has still one
thousand years of life before it.” Byzantine art, says Morris extends not only
backwards in time, but also across Europe in space. “East and West,” he says, “it
overran the world wherever men built with history behind them. In the East it
mingled with the traditions of the native populations, especially with Persia of the
Sassanian period … In the West it settled itself in the parts of Italy that Justinian had
conquered, notably Ravenna, and thence came to Venice. From Italy, or perhaps
even from Byzantium itself, it was carried into Germany and pre-Norman England,
touching even Ireland and Scandinavia” (Morris 1936: 2: 274).

Which carries the mind back to Stockholm, and back, too, to Yeats’s
conversations with Ragnar Östberg, who must have told him that he, too, when he
visited England in 1899 had fallen under the spell of William Morris and the British
Arts and Crafts movement. In the decoration of Stockholm town hall Yeats saw
many of Morris’s ideas fulfilled. He admired the execution of the mosaics and
frescos as an expression of artistic community, the choice of themes expressive of
communal history, and the freedom that had been given to individual artists under
the collective direction of the architect. The parallels in Yeats’s mind between
Sweden’s egalitarianism, the guild systems of Byzantium and his aspirations for the
new Irish Free State are very evident. “In early Byzantium,’ he wrote in A Vision,
maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical
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life were one, that architect and artificers spoke to the multitude and the few alike.”
(1962: 279).

By the time he left Stockholm the political and social elements of

Yeats’s Byzantine myth were in place but he was yet to clarify the personal, private
meanings that he attributed to this period. In this way the attractive austerity of
Byzantine art was to come clearer to him only when he ‘sailed’ to Byzantium for the
second time in his life. He knew that Einer Forseth had travelled to Sicily in 1921 in
search of ideas for the mosaic decoration of the town hall. And he probably knew
that in the figure of San Pietro in a side apse of the cathedral in Cefalù Forseth had
found a model for his Queen of the Mälaren. So in November 1924 he made his own
pilgrimage to Cefalù, Palermo, and Monreale in search of an emblem of the spiritual
life. Before leaving, however, he prepared himself by spending some of the Nobel
prize-money on books that would tell him more about Byzantine art. Among these
were Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, W. G. Holmes’s The
Age of Justinian and Theodora (1905-7), and a recent translation of Josef
Strzygowski’s Origin of Christian Church Art (1923). He also bought a copy of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica that contained articles by W. R. Lethaby on this period.
Lethaby’s, The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople (1894) had been an epoch-
making study of a Byzantine building, and in an article on Byzantium in the
Encyclopaedia Britannic Yeats would have read that Byzantine art involved “the
elimination of non-essentials” and “an intensity of expression such as may nowhere
else be found”. In Byzantine art all was “solemn, epical cosmic”. It was an art of
“the spirit not of the body”, “hieratic, impersonal (Lethaby 1910 –11: 4: 908). He
also bought O.M. Dalton’s Byzantine Art and Archaeology (1911) where Dalton
stressed the incorporiality of Byzantine art, “elect and spiritual” (Dalton 1911: 33); it
is an art, he said, that “frankly renounces nature” (Dalton 1911: 35). This struck a
sympathetic chord in Yeats. “Consumed with desire”, as he wrote in “Sailing to
Byzantium”, he was, alas, “an aged man”, “a paltry thing”, and “a tattered coat upon
a stick”: thus the necessity to distance himself from “the young in one another’s
arms” and to seek solace with the “singing masters” of his soul in Byzantine art
(Yeats 1973: 217).

Back in 1907 in Ravenna and as a much younger man he had been struck
by the hieratic nature of Byzantine art. In the following year Yeats put words into the
mouth of Owen Aherne in “The Tables of the Law” saying how “the Byzantine style
… moves me because these tall emaciated angels and saints seem to have less
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relation to the world about us than to an abstract pattern of flowing lines, that suggest
an imagination absorbed in the contemplation of Eternity” (Yeats 1992: 150 note).
Now seventeen years later old age had given a spur to Yeats’s desire to find an
existential alternative to youthfulness and organic plenitude; to identify a place that
endorsed and valorized his maturity. So late in 1924, Yeats and his wife set out for
Sicily, where his experience of Byzantine art did not disappoint him. He began a
collection of sixty-two black-and-white photographs5 of what in A Vision he called
the “supernatural splendour” of the mosaics and where he made his famous
pronouncement that if he could “be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it
where [he] could [he] would spend it in Byzantium, a little before Justinian opened
St Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato” (Yeats 1962: 279). Like Morris before
him, Yeats never saw Hagia Sophia, but he was intensely moved by the Cappella
Palatina in Palermo and an art form where the spirit took precedence over flesh.
'Nobody,' he said, 'can stray into that little Byzantine chapel at Palermo, which
suggested the chapel of the Grail to Wagner, without for an instant renouncing the
body and all its works' (Yeats1975: 478). In Palermo the personal and the historical
came together. Stimulated by his journey to Stockholm, where the Arts and Crafts
ideals of the Byzantine revival provided him with a social and political model for the
“Unity of Culture”, on the shores of the Mediterranean he rediscovered an art which
in its hieratic detachment offered an image of the body transcended by the spirit. The
unity of image in the Byzantine world offered Yeats a model for the new world of
the Irish Free State, whose own history was closely linked to that of Byzantium. As
early as 1881 Morris had written that Byzantine art was felt “from Bokhara to
Galway, from Iceland to Madras” and that “all the world glittered with its brightness
and quivered with its vigour” (Morris 1881: 158). Fifty years later, in 1931, after
completing both his Byzantine poems Yeats said: “I have been writing about the
state of my soul … . When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells and making
jewelled crosiers…Byzantium was the centre of European civilization … so I
symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.”6
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It has often been suggested (notably by Jeffares 1984: 214-5) that the procession of martyrs in Apollinare Nuovo in
Ravenna provided Yeats with the inspiration for the ‘sages standing in God’s holy fire’.
2
This path, or parts of it, have been previously explored by Melchiori 1960, Fletcher and Gordon 1961, Mcalindon, T.
1966-7, Levin 1983, and Jeffares 1984.
3
When Östberg came to Dublin in 1926 Yeats entertained him lavishly. See Letter to Olivier Shakespeare, Dec 7 1926.
(Yeats 1954: 719-200.
4
Morris delivered this lecture five times between 1889 and 1890. It was given again as to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition
Society and then published by the Kelmscott Press both in1893.
5
Russell E. Murphy documents these photographs in Murphy 2004: 114-129.
6
Yeats’s words come from a BBC broadcast in September 1931 and are quoted in Jeffares 1984: 213.