“And therefore have I sailed the seas, and come To the holy city of Byzantium.”
BECAUSE I am much preoccupied, perhaps rightly, D with modern poetry, I must now and then sail the seas back into the past, and find once more the holy city where great poets have built their long-enduring pyramids and towers. That city is full of voices uttering magic phrases, and some of these float into my ears in muffled music of unimaginable beauty.
My own approach to great poetry-oh, long ago was through the theatre. Before entering that house of enchantment I was innocent of grandeur. I can remember having been moved, in earliest childhood, by Mother Goose rhythms—the idyl of Bopeep, the grotesque accord of Jack Spratt and his wife, the tragedy of the lady whose skirts were cut round about while she slept on the highway, until she had to weep for her lost identity and refer the matter to her little dog. But that was before the curtain rose on my first play-an event which occurred very early in our family. The theatre was our way of sailing to Byzantium, and I could not have been more than six or eight when Edwin Booth and the other Shakespearean actors first took me there. Their utterance of the richly rhythmed verse was honey on the tongue for me, and it sent me to the printed page whence I could pluck out the lines, and learn some of them by heart, and make them sound their fateful music in my enchanted ears as I said them over to Lake Michigan or to the willow tree in our back yard.
Antony and Cleopatra, for instance-a play I never saw but once, and .then unwillingly, and would never risk seeing again, so improbable is it that any actors made of human flesh and blood could suggest the marvel of its splendor. Not only the two principals who kinged and queened it on so large a stage, but also those lesser characters in the great drama whose few words fall like crimson petals into the dark pool of their destiny. Iras, who could say to her mistress, when the hour of doom had struck:
Finish, good lady-the bright day is done
And we are for the dark.
Charmian, who “loved long life better than figs,” and yet, dying herself, praised the queen for dying:
It is well done, and fitting for a princess
Descended of so many royal kings.
And Dolabella, Cleopatra’s last lover, whom Charmian loved in vain. And Eros, and Enobarbus, and the cold victorious Octavius. These as a mere background for Cleopatra’s royal outbursts of superb hyperbole, and Antony’s upheavals of terrible emotion, especially the dying speech which Shakespeare took almost bodily from North’s Plutarch. All wonderful, wonderful-made up of gorgeous phrases, lines full of life and color, in rhythms that shake the earth.
All the plays—comedies, tragedies, histories–gave me magic lines. Booth’s very princely Hamlet had many of them to say, ending with “The rest is silence.” Lear, bringing in Cordelia dead:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more
Never, never, never.
Richard the Second, facing his cousin-enemies:
Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal
The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne!
Prospero asking Miranda:
What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?
and confessing:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
All of these and many other shining lines so familiar that they are almost new again!
The plays led me to the sonnets, a treasure-trove of beauty–their sad profound searching of life’s inadequacies; genius aspiring, loving, frustrate and inconsolable-inconsolable even when prophesying immortality for the poem’s richly woven words:
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.
Your name from hence unmortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die.
The earth can yield me but a common grace
When you entombed in men’s hearts shall lie.
The slow soft wood-wind music of such a sonnet as the
seventy-third plays over a tragic self-distrust:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
Age coming on, inevitable change, loveliness perishing
around him—the poet suffered a clutch at the heart for all
the common tragedies:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
Oh, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
And the ever-present tragedy of man’s mortality:
Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore
So do our minutes hasten to their end.
I could continue quoting from the sonnets through page
after page, for they have been to me like a deep well from
which to draw ever fresh delight; like a garden full of roses
of different colors and perfumes; like a summer sea with
the sun on it, or a sombre sea moved by a winter storm.
It is marvelous how they respond to every mood.
One need not be alone in the presence of great poetry. It companions one in times of stress when other com- panionship would be inadequate. I have spoken this time only of Shakespeare, who has indeed been for me, of all poets, the supreme companion, unfailing in understanding and that strange tenderness of pity which the great must feel for all human souls. But if one immortal name were not enough for a brief essay, I might go on with others whose magic boats have carried me to the ports of dream.
For no other voyage is so well worth talking about; no other voyage can match that one as a magnificent adventure. “The holy city of Byzantium” has become the Turkish Istanbul; Saint Sophia’s, the jewelled cathedral of Justinian, has been a mosque for centuries-indeed, I have sailed thither in the flesh and stood under the golden dome; I can testify to these desecrating actualities.
Yet still we may take ship with Mr. Yeats, and rejoice that we can sail thither in the spirit. The great poetsthe “sages”-are there ahead of us, and their modern peer, the Irish singer, will lead us to them.
An aged man 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.
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence,
And therefore have I sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
Osages 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.
“The artifice of eternity”-it’s a goodly phrase, and will bear thinking on by those who have taken the spirit-path to Byzantium.
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