WRITING PRACTICE TWO
INTRODUCTIONS:
Reality is truth, truth reality
Want to be immortal? Sure, we’ve all
thought about it. The thought of being immortal is something that is
unconceivable. You would be able to live throughout time, through times
of war,
famine, and other events and not even worrying about passing away.
Being
immortal would seem to be something that you would absolutely want,
right?
According to John Keats‘s poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, this is
not the
case. Through establishing the subjects of art, death, and love,
Keats makes a comparison between a world of reality and a world of
imagination,
where the world of reality is more desirable.
Sailing
to Byzantium: Yeats’ Monument of Unaging Intellect
By way of it’s very nature, the world we inhabit is steeped in
mystery. We as humans know from past generations that our time in these
bodies will one day cease; the concept of mortality. It is because of
mortality’s fleeting disposition that we are posed with the quandary of
life: particularly, why does it have to end and in what manner should
we interact with others before it does? Our limited knowledge and
resources may never uncover the answers to the preceding questions, but
that fact only motivates man further along the path to discovery. For
ages, men and women of all races have tried to overcome, or at least
demystify these overwhelming questions. Art, in a sense, is our
very attempt to do just that. It is the best method for us, with our
limits, to understand or clarify the unimaginable aspects of the human
nature. This is exactly what William Butler Yeats strived to achieve
with his poem Sailing to Byzantium. By means of establishing a
correlation between love, art and death, Yeats pondered the impending
resolution of his own life, if not the lives of all men.
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Sailing to Byzantium
William
Butler Yeats composed this poem to direct his attitude towards
Byzantium, the capital of the Roman Empire. This
capital not only represented the center of the empire’s state, but also
the core of their empirical belief. The
culture and the views of the Roman Empire began to shape Byzantium into
a poorly configured capital. Yeats took
notice to this and warned that the structure that had become wasn’t
compatible with realistic societies. The
governed were not in interest and those who governed took heed in
themselves and their simplistic ways. Nothing
was being done to help structure an empire that was strong and
powerful, yet efficient and effective. In
Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats calls attention to the
death of himself through the dead state of the Roman capital.
POINT-FIRST
PARAGRAPHS
The
swan that Zeus appears as seems to represent art in most of this poem. Swans are
considered elegant, graceful, and beautiful by most people. In this poem the swans “great wings beating
still” shows that art, while inanimate, is still alive and “beating.” Art can present both beauty and suffering
to its audience. When “the dark
webs” caressed her thighs, she became terrified and suffered. The beautiful part of art comes from the
appearance of the swan, while the suffering comes from the actions of
the
swan. “The great wings” and “feathered
glory” show the beauty of art. The
“dark webs” caressing her thighs cause the “staggering girl” to become
“terrified” showing more of the emotions that art can evoke. Art is able to control its audience by
causing them to feel certain emotions and the audience is incapable of
resisting it as long as they see the art.
The art “mastered” its audience and held it captive in the air. She, as the audience, is unable to resist
the effect of the swan, or art, so she cannot “push the feathered glory
from
her loosening thighs”, unable to fight back so she slowly begins to
accept it.
____________
Yeats’ uncommon use of
metrical tools helps add to the style of his poem. Each stanza is
separated and numbered as if to indicate each
turning event; with each new number comes a different aspect to the
story and a
new “chapter.” These stanzas represent
the principal eight-line stanza (ottava
rima) which breaks down into a cross-rhymed sestet and a couplet. This type of sonnet is heroic
and has a Shakespearean rhyme. Usually
this form is used in comedic poetry; however, Yeats
manages it to be read as serious and even sad.
______________
To
tell this epic in his own words, William Butler Yeats chooses the form
of a sonnet. This is not surprising
because majority of sonnets are about love and love serves as the theme
of this poem, though not in a predictable way. Not
many poems focus on rape, which is the subject here, especially not
rape that transpires between animal and human. The poem takes on the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD
EFGEFG and is separated in thought between the first eight
lines(otherwise known as an octave) and
______
Death in this poem is
inferred as Keats doesn’t formally mention the word “death” but he uses
words
and phrases that can be associated with it.
In
the fourth section of the poem a scene of sacrifice is taking place, as
the
question is asked “who are these coming to the sacrifice?”
Accompanying this question is the mentioning
of a “mysterious priest” who leads a heifer which is dressed garlands
to a
green altar to be slaughtered in a religious ceremony.
In the fifth section the word eternity is
used which also suggests death as in order to live or last for eternity
one
must first die. Then we get the
statement “when old age shall this generation waste, thou shalt remain,
in the
midst of other woe”. Just a couple
lines before this the speaker is talking about the shape and other
features of
the urn so to me the statement suggests that when old age kills the
present
generation the urn will remain to tell its story in the midst of the
next
generations woe, and because we don’t know whether or not Keats is
writing
about a real urn or not
___________________________________________
Indeed, Leda
and the Swan compares the rape of Leda with Mary’s impregnation by
the Holy
Spirit. The vagueness of the poem helps Yeats to achieve this. For example, he does not
mention a swan aside from the title itself. Thus, what is implied
to
be a swan can also be interpreted as a dove, the characteristic
symbol
of the Holy Spirit. This connection is developed further in line seven
when the
author describes Leda as “laid in that white rush.” The white color is
a
distinguishing feature of both swans and doves. Likewise, the
child of
Zeus and Leda is not discussed in the poem; in fact, its gender
is also not
mentioned at all. What the poem does allude to about the baby is
that it
will have also be interpreted as a dove, the characteristic symbol of
the Holy
Spirit. This connection is developed further in line seven when the
author
describes Leda as “laid in that white rush.” The white color is a
distinguishing feature of both swans and doves. Likewise, the
child of
Zeus and Leda is not discussed in the poem; in fact, its gender is also
not
mentioned at all. What the poem does allude to about the baby is
that it
will have great consequences, particularly destructive ones. Therefore,
one can
also interpret the child as Jesus Christ, who will grow up and live a
life of
great controversy. The stories of Zeus raping Leda and the Holy
Spirit
impregnating Mary are connected through their circumstances and through
their
consequences. Whereas one child, Helen, unintentionally spun the
land into
the prolonged and arduous Trojan War, the other created a religion
through
which a plethora of conflict erupted for generations and generations
and
continues today. Yeats is able to draw the reader’s attention from the
cruel
rape scene to thoughts of ruin and death in the last sestet with
simple,
powerful imagery and one particularly heavy end-stop. One disturbing
feature of
the comparison between Jesus’ and Helen’s birth is that Yeats puts them
in a
very dark tone. Although the Greek myth is far from lighthearted, the
Christian
story of the birth of Christ is typically told as joyous and
celebratory. In
reading the poem, one does not feel warm and comforted or even neutral.
Yeats,
it seems, is attempting to insert a sinister quality to separate the
reader
from his own personal bonds with the traditional story of Jesus’ birth.
__________________
Keats’ last stanza, instead of being filled with
questions, is composed of bold statements and exclamations. He sums up each of his
previous statements in these last ten lines.
The last two lines however, are the most powerful.
“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is
all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Ironically,
Keats does not believe what he is bravely stating,
he is using its fantastic falsehood to further depict the urn’s
painting. Life exists in the moment
that was captured
on the vase, there is no love because the lovers are never going to
move, there
is no death because men and maidens on a vase don’t die, there is
simply
beauty. True beauty exists in the art
of the urn, but only there, for the people on the vase, is truth beauty
and
beauty truth. In their world that is
all they need to know.
CONCLUSIONS:
Yeats
then saw love and the pursuit of our desires as our own mortality. If
it were not for them, we could take full advantage of art and make use
of our lives here on Earth. He viewed love as something worldly and
askew, imploring those who follow him to cast of such hindrances, as
did the martyrs pictured burning in a holy flame; and as Yeats himself
did. Casting off the desires of his human flesh, Yeats took the
form of art itself in order to inspire and warn upcoming generations.
Although he is not in the form of a great bird in some magnificent
palace, Yeats’ purpose was achieved to some extent, considering this
poem is being read and discussed almost a century after it was
published. It is here singing, reminding us to look towards and heed
the ‘monuments of unaging intellect’