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Together, “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium” are viewed as statements on spiritual and artistic
rebirth, as well as symbolic representations of the creative poetic process
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The motif of the journey is an oft-discussed one in the poems
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The “Sailing to Byzantium” describes the voyage to the country of the mind while “Byzantium” is a
proper presentation of an ideal state beyond life
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Sophia has announced the appropriate time for spiritual meditation and divine
revelation
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Byzantium was the capital of the eastern Wing of the Holy Roman Empire
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In W
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Yeats' poem Byzantium ceases to have its
traditional meaning
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It is a world of
immortality beyond limits of time and space
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Richard Ellman writes, "Byzantium is a holy city, because it is the capital of Eastern Christendom, but
it is also Yeats's holy city of the imagination as Golgonooza was Blake's"
The presence of the moon in the poem signifies a lot
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It also represents the different phases in man's life
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It is typifies the center point between
the conscious and the unconscious
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John
Unterecker writes about Yeats' use of symbols:
Yeats draws his from nature, that same natural world glorified by the romantics
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Made "strange" by
those values, his "masked" romantic images jolt us into a recognition of their
symbolical function (Unterecker 40)
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Obviously, it stands in direct contrast with 'the fury and mire of human veins'
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Gold is a precious metal, it
never rusts
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But dolphins themselves are
also the symbol of earthly love
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In the last line the poet has come back to the shores of

the ocean of life, which is agitated by the conflicting claims of the flesh and spirit, the extremities
between which the mortal man swings like a pendulum

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