SOURCE: Steinman, Michael. “Yeat's ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’” The Explicator 52, no. 2 (winter 1994): 93-4.

In the following essay, Steinman examines how the source of Yeat's poem may have come from Shakespeare's King Lear.

In “The Circus Animals' Desertion,” W. B. Yeats asserted that his images “[g]rew in pure mind” (630). But the golden bird of “Sailing to Byzantium” may make us feel that “pure mind,” although compelling, is not sufficient explanation. Where did that singing bird come from? Yeats's creative eclecticism, blending the morning's conversation with philosophical abstractions, makes the notion of one and only one source for any image implausible: See Frank O'Connor's comments on the genesis of “Lapis Lazuli,” for example (211-22). We cannot discard Yeats's note to the poem, “I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang” (825), although its first four...