Sailing to Byzantium

The concept of the “gyre” (Line 19) appears in the final stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium” as a reference to Yeats’s complex idea of cyclicality. This kind of cyclicality is four-dimensional, like a pair of cones twisting their way around each other. Unable to rely on this image as an adequate explanation, he explicitly lays out his philosophy in his book on poetics and mysticism, A Vision (1925). The timeline of humanity, he argues, is a “Great Wheel” consisting of 28 points—one for each part of the lunar cycle—surrounding the circle like numbers on a clock. Rather than two hands, the wheel has four, each representing polar concepts such as Mask and Body (secularity) and Will and Creative Mind (religiosity). Together the 28 spokes form an entire cycle as the elements coalesce in different combinations. A full cycle symbolizes existence in two ways: On the microcosmic level, it is the life, death, and rebirth of an individual, while on a macrocosmic level it accounts for 2000 years of human history, which periodically shifts from epochs of terror into ones of beauty.

From Yeats’s vantage, the wheel’s halfway point is a fleeting moment of historical splendor. Between the reign of the ancient Greeks in 500 BC and the Italian Renaissance in 1500 AD was the glory of Byzantium, which began in 500 AD. Historical cycles are comparable to the way a gyre spirals outward from a single point and comes back to start the process again from the opposite direction; he called this the movement from “Discord” to “Concord.” For Yeats, the gyre dramatizes the dynamic forces of his philosophy of history, and the motions to which it constantly subjects humanity: It is existence itself. If one is to participate in the cycles of history without falling victim to decay, the entirety of human history must be innate to this work of art: an impossible project that is always heralding something “passing, or to come.”

This theory of time may resemble humanist dialectical philosophies, but Yeats explicitly rejects G.W.F. Hegel’s model, which is reliant upon negation in the name of linear progress. Yeats’s philosophy is more aligned with the cyclical cosmology of Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence (in which all matter in the universe repeats with minor differences), than anything strictly anthropocentric. In a letter to Lady Gregory from September 1902, Yeats discloses his immense admiration of Nietzschean thought: “I have written to you little and badly of late I am afraid, for the truth is you have a rival in Nietzsche, that strong enchanter. I have read him so much that I have made my eyes bad again.”