Sailing to Transcendence:Reading Yeats’s Byzantium Poems as Conceptual Sequel

Abstract

This study re-examines the relationship between W.B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" (1927) and "Byzantium" (1930), challenging the conventional view that they are thematically parallel. It argues that the poems form a definitive conceptual sequel. By applying Christopher Paul Richards's theory of the sequel, tracing the progression through Yeats's own ontological system in A Vision, and incorporating insights from Suchismita Sarkar's article on Yeats's Eastern philosophy and biography, this analysis demonstrates that both poems constitute a linear single narrative. The first poem portrays the soul's passionate attachment to the mortal body and its desire for aesthetic immortality in Byzantium, while the second narrates the soul's transcendence in Byzantium toward celestial purification and achieved immortality in eternal intellect and Byzantine art. Through Peircean semiotic analysis informed by Yeats's A Vision, biography, and Eastern philosophical thought, this study reveals a coherent spiritual continuum, establishing both poems as a conceptual sequel.