Birthdays and Sailing to Byzantium

It was my birthday last weekend  I think most people are curious about with whom they share a birthday. My October 20 is shared with Mickey Mantle, Bela Lugosi, Kamala Harris, Viggo Mortensen, John Krasinki, Snoop Dogg, and Tom Petty. I did play baseball as a kid, but I was no Mantle. I do play guitar, but I'm no Petty. The birthdays that I most connect to are two poets. 

Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. I've read his poetry and about his life and I don't feel we are similar in either our lives or writing. It did connect with me that at a point he just stopped writing and the reason seems to be that he had lost hope of being heard. I know that feeling.

My strongest connection is to the poet Robert Pinsky. I've met him several times at readings and shared our connections. He was also born in New Jersey (Long Branch, down the Jersey shore). In high school he played the saxophone and it was his "first experience of art, or the joy in making art." Like me, he was the first person in his family to go to college and we both attended Rutgers. In his freshman poetry class, he encountered "Sailing to Byzantium" by W.B. Yeats. He said: "It was the speed with which he covered the ground. Wow: 'artifice of eternity'!'' Pinsky typed up "Sailing to Byzantium" and hung it on his dorm room wall, and decided to become a poet himself. Pinsky was the first poet laureate consultant in poetry to serve three consecutive one-year terms.

In my freshman year, I discovered T.S. Eliot and his poetry took me to a very different place from the poetry I had been writing in high school.

William Butler Yeats is considered one of the greatest poets of the English language. He received the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. His work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland.

I reread that poem which I'm pretty sure I had read in high school (when I naively thought Yeats and Keats rhymed) and again in college, but it wasn't the epiphany that Pinsky had with the words. Rereading it five decades later, it is opening and closing lines that hits me hardest: "That is no country for old men... Of what is past, or passing, or to come."

I was too young for this poem when I first read it. It is about mortality and the frailty of the human body as we age. Yeats wrote this poem when he was 62 and beginning to address old age - though he would live another 11 years.

Yeats chose Byzantium as the setting for his poem because it represented a mythical, timeless realm of spiritual beauty and artistic excellence. It was at least a symbolic escape from the aging process and the material world of his own time. Byzantium's rich history in art, particularly its gold mosaics, further contributed to this idealization of a place where the soul could transcend mortality through creative expression.

The Byzantine Empire is long gone, but the legacy of the empire and its capital city, Byzantium, can still be seen today. The former capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, is now known as Istanbul, Turkey. The city is still considered a crossroads between Europe and Asia.

The poem still reads to me like the kind of poem I would never write. It feels old. I don't write poems that are very similar to Pinsky, though I am closer in style to him than Yeats. 

Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats (1865 –1939)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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