The way I read it, Yeats, the old man, wishes to become a piece of art without bodily worries. The world is a hard place for the old, and he dreams of joining the ancients, the prophets and saints in their golden unaging works of art, made by human hands but never sharing the failings of the human body.
The last bit is about wanting to be a small mechanical bird designed to amuse a sleepy Emperor. According to the final line of the poem, the bird sings of what is past and passing and to come, so it must be more than just a contraption; it is a magical toy imbued with a prophetic gift, a type of Artificial Intelligence. Yeats died long before the Age of Computers and the Internet. Perhaps he would have liked to be downloaded into a server; many science fiction stories describe that kind of fate. It seems a shame to lose a genius to mortality, so the great man's mind is downloaded into a computer. These stories never end well for the genius.
The way I read it, Yeats, the old man, wishes to become a piece of art without bodily worries. The world is a hard place for the old, and he dreams of joining the ancients, the prophets and saints in their golden unaging works of art, made by human hands but never sharing the failings of the human body.
I’m a fan of Harold Bloom and value his commentary on literature. I really enjoyed this article and quickly went off to read “Byzantium”. Thank you.
The last bit is about wanting to be a small mechanical bird designed to amuse a sleepy Emperor. According to the final line of the poem, the bird sings of what is past and passing and to come, so it must be more than just a contraption; it is a magical toy imbued with a prophetic gift, a type of Artificial Intelligence. Yeats died long before the Age of Computers and the Internet. Perhaps he would have liked to be downloaded into a server; many science fiction stories describe that kind of fate. It seems a shame to lose a genius to mortality, so the great man's mind is downloaded into a computer. These stories never end well for the genius.