SOURCE: “Yeats: To Byzantium,” in Strangers and Pilgrims: An Essay on the Metaphor of Journey, Norwegian Universities Press, 1964, pp. 337-52.

In the following essay, Roppen and Sommer explore the defining themes of “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium,” contending that the poems “work out a myth of spiritual and artistic rebirth.”

For various reasons, the Romantics and Victorians could best express their spiritual conditions, private and public, through the structure of the journey as an unending quest; or if a goal was hinted, it was left vague enough to accommodate a wide range of symbolic meaning. As faith and myth receded and the traditional patterns of Christian teleology lost their hold on the poetic imagination, the value of the image of life as a journey was sought in the actual process of discovery of the self, or the splendour of action, or the greatness of the past. Combined with...