SOURCE: “From Innisfree to Hagia Sophia: The Heritage of Meaning in Yeats's ‘Sailing to Byzantium’,” in Yeats Eliot Review, Vol. 10, No. 4, Fall, 1990, pp. 85-89.

In the following essay, Allen finds parallels in imagery and meaning between Yeats's “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “Sailing to Byzantium.”

… I must leave my myths and symbols to explain themselves as the years go by and one poem lights up another. …

Preface to Poems (1895), 1901 reprint

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “Sailing to Byzantium” are perhaps Yeats's two most familiar poems, the one from his early period and the other from his middle-late period. Interestingly, the two poems, along with certain other pieces, are more closely related to each other in imagery and meaning than is superficially apparent or than has generally been supposed. Further than that, the tracing of such interrelationships suggests important conclusions about thematic emphases in the later and...