Bloom/ Yeats / Byzantium

the desire to love what will not die

Bloom/ Yeats/ Byzantium

There are many videos on YouTube of the late poetry professor Harold Bloom engaging with interviewers. In some of these, he doesn’t hear well and smacks his lips; his thoughts wander. Sometimes he seems a foolish old crank and other times a genius-level critic. I love him.

In one interview he described Yeats as the greatest of the 20th Century poets and recited the beginning of “Sailing to Byzantium.” Then he abruptly declared that its companion poem “Byzantium” is even greater and recited it, skipping a few lines. I have always loved “Sailing to Byzantium” and not loved its sibling poem “Byzantium.” I never assigned “Byzantium” to students or read it out loud to them. I loved “Sailing” so much I memorized it and performed it for my students and anyone else who would let me do it. To this day I love to recite the lines about the aged man; like so many of us, he 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.”

The last part of “Sailing” has never appealed to me. I can (sort of) appreciate Yeats’s claim there is no “singing school” except studying “monuments of unaging intellect.” He means the masterpieces we store in literature anthologies and museums. The great works of art can teach us to sing. But then we arrive at the poem’s peculiar conclusion. The final bits of “Sailing” have to do with the poet’s desire to be an art object, and nothing so great as a Beethoven symphony or the Taj Mahal. He desires to be a little golden mechanical bird possessed by an emperor who does not pay much attention to it. Why would anyone want to be a trinket? Even an expensive and well made one? Wouldn’t it be better to be a real bird than a fake one? I can appreciate the poet’s desire to make art, but to BE art?

Listening to Bloom recite “Byzantium,” I heard it for the first time, as Bloom must have heard it, a rhapsody that transcends common sense. It is indeed a great poem, shocking and magnificent, and better than “Sailing.” I have no idea how I managed to miss its splendors for all these years.

The poem’s chief glory is the sheer sound and music of it, the building force; it turns into a rhapsodic chant. Like “Sailing” it has to do with art, but now great art is compared to the gods and the impassive stars above us. They are free of “the fury and the mire of human veins.” In a way it seems a type of confusion to consider a work of art a god -- on the other hand, isn’t that what gods are, human works of art, created by genius poets and story tellers? The gods are the art we make and then worship, the art we love and fear. Great artists like Michelangelo who make use of religious stories in their art make art of art. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, its picture of a god is a picture of a picture.

There is something about the impassive superiority of the gods, of stars and masterpieces, that deeply appealed to Yeats and freed him from his ordinary human suffering. Yeats appreciated anyone who was in agony and wanted to be free of the agony. Masterpieces are free of agony; they are free of positive human feelings too -- free of joy, free of ecstasy. They never fall in love, never have an orgasm, never shed a tear.

Why do I love the poem “Byzantium”? Is it just the music, the rhapsody? The astonishing art of it? I admire the honesty of it. The gods do not love us. Art does not love us. It outlasts us. And yet we may love the gods, love the stars, love the masterpieces that seem immortal. We desire to love what will not die.