SOURCE: “George Herbert and Yeats's ‘Sailing to Byzantium’,” in Four Decades of Poetry, 1890-1930, Vol. 1, 1976, pp. 51-53.

In the following essay, McFarland considers the influence of George Herbert's work on “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Although George Herbert is named in A Vision, very little has been said of his possible influence upon William Butler Yeats's poetry. Moreover, since Yeats scarcely mentions the great seventeenth-century devotional poet elsewhere in his writings, there would appear to be no reason to expect any noteworthy influence. There have been a few observations, however, concerning some possible interest in Herbert on the part of Yeats. T. R. Henn has suggested that The Winding Stair, a volume of poems which first appeared in 1929, is titled after a line in Herbert's ‘Jordan (I)’: ‘Is all good structure in a winding stair?’¹ Yeats's note cited in the variorum edition of the poems, however, indicates that ‘In this...