GATHERING TOGETHER IN “SAILING TO BYZANTIUM”
GATHERING TOGETHER IN “SAILING TO BYZANTIUM”

Summary/Abstract: This essay is part of an ongoing project entitled “Bypassing The Plot: The Bilateral Ploy of Writing” that explores, in selected masterpieces of twentieth-century writing, the interplay of contrasting ways of achieving completion: first, by the overt arrangement of episodes of the story to form a plot, which is time-bound in the sense that it relies on the passage of time to achieve this effect; second, by the creation of covert patterns within the plot that stage the emergence of timeless bilateral symmetries. I call these patterns “ploys” to suggest their uncanny resemblance to “plot”, with respect to which they serve as an artfully contrived source of completion. After paying close attention to the easily overlooked presence of these “timeless completions” as they appear in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, I then consider three other of his poems in which time-bound journeys stage the emergence of timeless patterns. From there, I move on to a consideration of Yeast’s poetic career itself as a three-part “journey” within which we discern a bilateral balancing achieved, on the one hand, by his borrowing poetic materials from stories told by Irish peasants in his early years and, on the other hand, by his borrowing a poetic form invented by an Italian poet in his later years. I conclude by tracing this interplay of a bypassed plot and the bilateral ploys that emerge within it back to the earliest -- and, arguably, its most perfect embodiment -- in Homer’s Iliad, and then follow its “journey” from the classical Greek period to the twentieth century via three theatrical masterpieces – Sophocles’ Oedipus The King, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot - that transmitted the Homeric model from its origin to the present day.

• Details
• Contents