Sailing To Byzantium

IIn this episode I read a favourite Yeats poem, tell you something of my debt to him and finish with a poem of my own.

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And now here are the texts of the Yeats poem, and my own 'Dancing Through the Fire

Sailing to Byzantium WB Yeats
I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.


II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.


III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.


IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.

Dancing through the Fire Malcolm Guite

Then stir my love in idleness to flame

To find at last the free refining fire

That guards the hidden garden whence I came.



O do not kill, but quicken my desire

Better to spur me on than leave me cold.

Not maimed I come to you, I come entire



Lit by the loves that warm, the lusts that scald

That you may prove the one, reprove the other,

Though both have been the strength by which I scaled



The steps so far to come where poets gather

And sing such songs as love gives them to sing.

I thank God for the ones who brought me hither



And taught me by example how to bring

The slow growth of a poem to fruition

And let it be itself, a living thing,



Taught me to trust the gifts of intuition

And still to try the tautness of each line,

Taught me to taste the grace of transformation



And trace in dust the face of the Divine,

Taught me the truth, as poet and as Christian ,

That drawing water turns it into wine.



Now I am drawn through their imagination

To dare to dance with them into the fire,

Harder than any grand renunciation,



To bring to Christ the heart of my desire

Just as it is in every imperfection

Surrendered to his sharp refiners fire



That love might have Its death and resurrection.

From The Singing Bowl Canterbury Press 2013