Thoughts On Eternity

As far as I know, only the great Yeats thought of eternity as some kind of artifice or construct of the "drowsy emperor."

I was wondering if anyone knows of any other poets who might have held this idea before Yeats. I expect a poet as great as Yeats to have ideas which may be soley his own. This could be one. It is easy to miss ideas like this, to read right over them. I read over this passage many times for years before its meaning jumped out at me. I have always found everything about the poetry of Yeats stirring, though. Blake had quite an influence on Yeats. I wonder if this is an idea Blake held.

I don't know of any "drowsy emperor" reference elsewhere, but deism in general seems to be similar to Yeats' idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism

I think a more traditional, say Christian, view of God is one who not only constructed or created out of nothing the universe in the past, but also supports it in the present. Supporting or sustaining the universe is forgotten in "cold" deism. I wonder to what extent even modern Christians believe God plays any role in the now to sustain the universe.

I think of deism as a social mood. One could call the period from 1780's to now as a period of overall positive social mood where people believed in reason or rationality. During this period people would believe that God wasn't necessary on a day to day basis. He could be "drowsy" for all they cared. What was needed was to understand how the construction worked. This leads to beliefs that the universe is also a machine and that living people could be reduced to machines. Everything falls under mathematical theories. I think that period is ending.

Try reading the poem. I couldn't care less what a bunch of sociologists have to say about the phrase.

Here is an interpretation of Sailing to Byzantium: http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/yeats/section6.rhtml This interpretation associates the poem with Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale as a rebuttal in the second page.

Earlier you claimed its meaning jumped out at you. What does the poem mean?

I have several points of contention with the interpretation given in the link. This is not a great surprise, since I do agree that the poem could be interpreted in many ways. For the most part I agree with the interpretation given.

First, I disagree that Yeats makes any reference to the young ignoring the old in this poem. Surely, the young of this world do indeed ignore its elderly, but I do not see Yeats addressing that particular point here. Old people are certainly not monuments of unageing intellect. First of all, they are not unageing, or Yeats would not even have a complaint. Yeats means the unageing monuments of art and intellect get ignored by those engrossed in the sensuality of the world.

The two phrases I am most fascinated with in the poem are skipped over by the interpretation given in the link without any comment. The phrase whose meaning I claimed jumped out at me was "drowsy emperor." I do not believe I said the meaning of the entire poem jumped out at me." The other phrase is "artifice of eternity."

Aside from an actual drowsy emperor kept awake by his artisan's inventive works, one is allowed to cast beyond this literal image, since Yeats was perhaps the most highly symbolic English poet of the 20th century. An obvious interpretation of this emperor is as God himself. That would be a God capable of drowsiness and boredom. Only the infinite works of the universe are capable of keeping God's interest, just as the sensual parts most easily keep man's interest, as stated in the first verse.

They skip right over the phrase "artifice of eternity," without comment as well. I think this phrase is a key to the whole poem. Yeats is saying that even eternity itself was invented as a piece of highly fashioned artifice. This is a unique view. I do not of any other place in literature where it occurs. That idea is why this thread was started.

I believe I disagree with the notion that Yeats is being set down as a bird on a golden bough at the end. He just told us a few line before that he will never take his bodily form from any natural thing. I see the form as far more abstract than a simple golden bird. I don't know what it is. The mind naturally wants to think of a bird here. I imagine it as some other form of highly wrought perfection beyond my imagination. Of course gold is simply a symbol for elemental purity which can be broken down no further.

I cannot address the question of whether the poem is a rebuttal of Keats. I barely know Keats at all. This rebuttal could very well be, but I am not qualified to speculate here. I would definitely be interested in hearing the ideas of others on this point.

I agree with your interpretation of "drowsy emperor" and "artifice of eternity". That is how I read them as well. However, I don't think it is a unique idea, but something a Deist would believe about God constructing an artifice (machine) that doesn't need any other effort from Him. I don't know enough about Keats either to judge if that interpretation makes sense or not.

I do not personally know of any place else in literature where eternity is considered an artifice. If you know of such a place, please point it out. I could not be truly shocked if Blake or even Milton had something similar. And of course there is Dante. I do not remember anything like that from him either, but it could very well be there and I could have forgotten about it.

Off the top of my head I don't know of the phrase being used elsewhere, but I don't think the idea underlying it is unique to Yeats. "Eternity as an artifice" is similar to the idea of a "mechanistic universe". Descartes and Newton probably believed something like that.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

Off the top of my head I don't know of the phrase being used elsewhere, but I don't think the idea underlying it is unique to Yeats. "Eternity as an artifice" is similar to the idea of a "mechanistic universe". Descartes and Newton probably believed something like that.

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Lad, I don't know about that. A blanket and cloud cover are similes too, but the differences may be more important. I cannot accept that a mechanistic universe and "artifice of eternity," are the same idea. I must confess, I do not accept that at all.

There are a few things you probably do not know about Yeats. He was not exactly staying breathlessly abreast of scientific progress and being inspired by it. Yeats was reading occult literature, Swedenborg and mystic poetry intensely. A mechanistic, deterministic universe would have been pretty distasteful to ol' Yeats. He was always making systems, and systems by their very nature are deterministic in some ways. For instance his theory of Gyres. These are really intersecting cones whose points meet, then are shoved right through each other until the point of A rests on the base of B, and vice versa.

Yeats loved this image for the way history cycles. Very tight circles near the point at the beginning of new cycles, widening as the age proceeds, until it becomes uncontrollably wide near the base and is suddenly thrown to the point of the other cone for the beginning of a new age.

There is nothing serious there for the scholar. We are better off believing Yeats did it all to find images for his poetry, the one thing he perhaps did better than anyone else. The silliness Auden lovingly accused him of was real, the mumbo jumbo of magic taken seriously by Yeats. Or was it? He needed images and breakthroughs always. His nature demanded them.

They cannot all be hits. From every system he tried to make, a few great poems were dragged out, some lasting images born. One system required at least one poem for every one of the twenty-eight phases of the moon. In another series Self and Soul slugged it out.

Artifice of eternity and Drowsy emperor are poetic hits not just of the 20th century but of all time. Their permanence is one thing Yeats was after. He identified with being a poet perhaps more strongly than anyone before him. He had a vision of it. He wanted to live like a poet, think and suffer like one, be treated like one. He even bought a tower to live in, because this is what a mystic poet would do. First cousin to a seer was he, in his own mind, personally acquainted with both Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, with both Tagore and Pound.

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So far, Yeats has only told me that eternity is artful, not that it is finite or mechanistic. I don't know where you get that. I say artifice and you automatically think orrery. Artifice does not have to mean some little tinker model. That would not be enough to keep the emperor and its infinite mind awake. Only the variety of infinity itself is enough, I believe Yeats is saying.

If he had written "eternity is artful" that I would find more interesting. It would imply eternity is willful enough to do something. An artifice doesn't do anything outside its programming or design.

I don't know what Sailing to Byzantium means. Many of Yeats phrases people know without even knowing where they came from, so the poem is very successful as influence. Which makes me suspect the poem is also getting its inspiration from social influences that would resonate with people. These influences would make the poem less unique but more successful. I am trying to identify what those influences are.

I think Yeats took his mumbo jumbo of magic seriously. But I wouldn't know. It just fits better with my view of what he would be thinking as a modern intellectual. Christians attack Deism as if it were atheism, but it is another form of Protestantism. It is a form of Christianity that doesn't take a church or sacred texts very seriously. Because of that it is no wonder that other forms of Christianity would find it suspect and want to discredit it. Deism believes in the human ability to be rational and figure things out on one's own. That is where Deism makes its mistakes. This sounds like what Yeats is doing with his system building and interest in the occult.

I believe there are some real Yeats hounds on the forum. I am hoping a few will show up in the discussion.

I feel that I have a pretty good handle on Sailing To Byzantium, but the later poem simply titled Byzantium presents far greater difficulties of interpretation, as far as I am concerned.

The choice of a stunning word is never a small thing with a great poet. The meaning and reason for the second word of The unpurged images of day recede, could generate some long and deep discussion by itself. In the poetry of Yeats I find mysterious lines and words that may stay with one for years with no exact settlement of their meaning or reason for being there. One trusts strongly, though, that Yeats had firm reasons.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned, from The Second Coming, is another such phrase for me. Only the greatest would have chosen the word ceremony there. I am not even sure why Yeats did that, or what he means by it, but I feel it is a mysterious and a great choice that few if any others would have made. One can find interpretations of it all around the internet, but that does not mean that any of them satisfy.

I prefer Sailing To Byzantium to Byzantium as a poem, but also as a philosophy. I like the vision of Yeats better in the earlier poem. Once he goes into detail in Byzantium, there are some wonderful lines, as are always found in Yeats, but the vision itself weakens in appeal. In the later poem he does mention a bird specifically, whereas the first poem does not. There is also something so inhuman about the cookie-cutter purified souls that are being turned out by the smithies in the workshops of Byzantium, that it makes me uncomfortable, perhaps because it conflicts with my own vision of afterlife. The fury and mire of human veins, is a fantastic line, but Yeats sees the elimination of all that in the transformative process of the iron works of Byzantium. The unchanging nature of things after the transformation I find completely distasteful as far as an afterlife goes. Yeats' ideal of being transformed into the essence of art brings me no joy or satisfaction.

Yeats does something in Byzantium that may be technically new. I am not sure how to place it or even discuss it. It may be a new way of apprehending (perhaps required in the new existence) or of acting upon or judging one's sensations. Once could be overlooked, but twice in the same poem may speak of something larger than a mere coincidence. Is there anything else quite like it in literature? He is evidently up to something. Is Yeats calling for something? Such mysteries can always be found in the master.

Consider the beginnings of verses two and three of Byzantium:

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than shade;...

and

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork;...

Cute and original, no doubt. But I have to agonize a bit over whatever Yeats might intend to suggest beyond his novel expression that these things are hard to express. If one were to find additional instances of this technique in later and contemporaneous efforts, that would probably mean the technique suggests something deeper, and is itself a symbol of something. It would be like Yeats to use a technique as a symbol.

I'm with Yeats. Eternity/infinity. a day dream.

For a while I have been impressed with the idea that the universe we experience might be an artificial simulation. To prove that your entire universe is not even real in the accustomed sense would seem impossible to ever determine. However, there could be a way to tease out the evidence anyway, according to some cosmologists/physicists. Where you have to look for signs that the universe is artificial, for something slightly amiss, and for the telltale contradictions, paradoxes and distortions that might accompany them, is anyplace in the universe that might reasonably be interpreted as a boundary region. I interpret eternity as "possibly such a region." It might even be a boundary region of a subjective universe.

Search the extremities of the place, as in "look into deep space," is a good beginning. There are many types of extremities to consider beyond the spatial.

Eternity is what god is in it self