Art and the Inner Life on Man

According to some scholars, thoughts, knowledge, love and life are bounded by space and time and Man is born to deal with the problems connected with it and die. There is no escape from it and this is his destiny. If he escapes he may reach a timeless and formless pure state of perfection in the other world. The Vision of W. B. Yeats is all about that, which he symbolically expresses as a spiraling cone with the broad base representing the mortal life of man and apex representing the spiritual life of man. The map of his inner life, philosophy and religion is his vision, basing which he wrote mostly all of his poems. Among them Sailing to Byzantium and Byzantium are the simple, philosophic and difficult master pieces nobody can fail to quote. The old man in this poem faces the problems of old age, death and regeneration and finally gives his decision. He says that this world is not for the old but for the young only. Here young lovers, birds on the tree and fishes of the sea, Fish, flesh or fowl, etc. sing songs in praise of mortal sensual song without caring for the ageless intellect or wisdom, which is treated as monuments only. Here animate nature is devoid of spirit or spiritually passive. On the other hand the old man is both physically and spiritually impotent, a mere paltry thing, an effigy, tattered cloth upon a stick. But he realizes that all the monument like things are teaching him the magnificence of soul.

He rejoices by this realization and sails to Byzantium, the world of spirit. There he prays for the sages of God, holy fire, the singing masters to descend spinning in a circular motion to relieve the soul from the body by burning the heart with the holy fire without leaving it in the dead body so that the desire in it for sensual passion shall be totally eradicated and then the soul released from the natural thing can take birth not in the body form of some neutral thing but in the external form of an art. He wants the goldsmith to make him into a golden bird on the golden bough to sing the song of eternity to the Emperor (poet), lords and ladies of Byzantium (his native place) praising the eternal spiritual love forever. Yeats simply says through this poem that the animate nature is devoid of spirit and temporary only but the inanimate art, poetry created by him is full of spirit and is immortal and permanent.

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

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

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

(Stanza III, IV, Sailing to Byzantium)

Wordsworth established for Nature a unique place and a Universal appeal in his poems which no one has superseded has superseded and surpassed so far in the world. Generally poets depict the beauty of Nature or show the similarities between the different moods of men and the sound, the fury, the gentility, etc. of Nature. But in the case of Wordsworth, Nature itself seems to have expressed everything for him through his pen like a benign teacher does to a good student. Indeed the knowledge Wordsworth gained from Nature by his eyes, ears, through his sense-perception and his thought conception helped him to develop his inner self in Nature can be seen in his poems such as Tintern Abbey, Ode: Intimations of Immortality Recollected From Childhood, The Prelude and so on. His feeling and thought, the growth of his mind rather the development of his inner life from the childhood up to 28 years is expressed in The Prelude which is in fact a spiritual autobiography of Wordsworth in the Epic form. Actually he planned to write about Man, Nature and Society in The Recluse for which The Prelude was written as an introduction.