The Strongest Support of the Soul ——Appreciation of the eternal artistry in Ode on a Grecian Urn and Sailing to Byzantine

Abstract: From the romantic poet John Keats to symbolical poet W. B. Yeats, both of them were persistently searching the eternity in the long journey of life. This paper tries to through the analysis of the two poems, Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn and Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium to reveal the truth that the strongest support of the soul not lies in the empty and rapidly decayed body but relies on the eternal artistry which transcends the time and space. Although the former comes from the romantic imagination of an exquisite works of art---an ancient Grecian urn, the latter originates from the Byzantium which is the symbol of art, of eternity, both of them contain the similar life philosophy, that is the immortal life lies in the art of eternal.
Key words: Ode on a Grecian Urn ; Sailing to Byzantium; eternal artistry; timeless

Introduction Life is limited, yet it is possible to find the eternal life. Is it contradictory? How can life be limited as well as eternal at the same time? Could it be true that life has no ending? Actually, as we all know, no matter who you are, rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, smart or mediocre, eventually you will die. However, there is one thing will never die, which is not belong to this dusty world.—that is the eternal artistry. It is true that the art will never die. Only in the combination of the art, our soul can reach the home of eternity. Throughout the ages, numerous people search and search in the long journey of life and through different aspects to prove it—music, painting, architecture, writing... and more importantly, poetry. In Byzantium, the symbol of art and eternity, our souls divorce from flesh and be attached to arts crafts. On a Grecian Urn, we experience the static immortality. It is free from time, and doesn't have to confront aging and death. The following parts will illustrate the truth by Yeats' and Keats' two poems.
The country for the immortal soul—Byzantium Poem by W.B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, published in his collection The Tower in 1928 and considered one of his masterpieces. The poem's major and most obvious theme centres on the contrast between that which decays and ultimately perishes (the human body) and that which is unchangeable and permanent (aesthetic artifacts). The author employs symbolism to illustrate the eternity and permanence of the art. An important symbol in Sailing to Byzantium is the ancient city of Byzantium, which in the fifth and sixth centuries was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and the center of art and architecture. Yeats said in his A vision that "I think if I could be given a month of antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato"(279). In the words of Yeats, Byzantium symbolized a way of life in which art is celebrated as artifice and represents "Unity of Being," in which "religious, aesthetic and practical life were one". (279) It was the purest embodiment of transfiguration into the timelessness of art and the civilization of Byzantium represented a zenith in art, spirituality, and philosophy. The poem has four stanzas. The opening stanza describes a state of youth, a sensuous, sometimes violent, life with emphasis on productivity and regeneration ("That is no country for old men"), and then contrasts this sensuality with the intellectual and the transitory with the permanent: "Caught in that sensual music all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect."

The second stanza is likely a meditation aboard ship on growing old. The only way that the withering or tattered body—which Yeats understands as the “clothing” of the soul—can be counteracted by singing or, specifically, by writing poems that are spoken songs, which in turn are sung poems. As there is no school to teach such singing, one must study the monumental “songs,” the magnificent art works that inspire the soul to sing and dance. And only in an ideal environment, like Byzantium— the center of the spiritual world can the speaker learn the songs of the soul.

In the third stanza, the speaker addresses the "sages" of Byzantium whose images are enclosed inside a holy fire, represented in a gold mosaic. This also is a disguised bird image. The sages may remind us of the Phoenix, an ancient, mythical bird whose body is consumed by fire, only to be reborn from its own ashes. But how can one rebirth and immortal like the glorious works of art in Byzantium.? At the end of this stanza,the speaker told us, only destroy the natural element—the heart which regarded as the home of his once youthful passions---can his soul step into the "artifice of eternity." In other words, "the impermanent dying heart or body is sacrificed for the permanence of singing intellect, golden art, the 'artifice of eternity' ''(Hochman)

By stanza four, the journey becomes fully imaginative, a reverie of life after death. The speaker decides how he will be reborn: as either a golden object from ancient “Grecian” Byzantium or as an object, probably a bird, placed on a “golden bough” in the emperor's palace at Constantinople. Like Jeffares mentioned “that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, with artificial birds that sang,” (44) The golden bough signifies eternality through its undying golden color and its mythic role. Placed in a golden tree the speaker has now completely transformed himself into a work of art, thus unable to decay. In the first stanza the birds of the natural world sing of "Whatever is begotten, born, and dies," and also die themselves at the hands of nature. With an eternal soul in an eternal form, the speaker can live through ages, able to know and tell "what is past, or passing, or to come," thereby indicating his immortality.

The static immobility sculpture—A Grecian Urn

What Yeats' expressed in Sailing to Byzantium which concerned about the eternity and permanence of the art can be also found in Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn in earlier times. In this poem, the speaker observes a relic of ancient Greek civilization, an urn painted with two scenes from Greek life. The first scene depicts musicians and lovers in a setting of rustic beauty. The speaker attempts to identify with the characters because for him they represent the timeless perfection only art can capture.

This scene also includes several small pictures. One is a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper's "unheared" melodies are sweeter than motal melodies because they are affected by time. Another one depicted the youth wants to kiss the girl , ''though winning near the goal'', yet fruitlessly because he is frozen in time. But he doesn't need to grieve, for the untouched frozen kiss implies that their love will never fade and the beauty of his lover will never change. In the third stanza, the speaker looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves, the boy's song will be "for ever new", and the love of the boy and the girl will last forever. Unlike the mortal love, which lapses into "breathing human passion" and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a "burning forehead, and a parching tongue".

In the fourth stanza, the speaker examined another scene on the urn, this one of group of villages leading a heifer to sacrifice at some green altar. He wonders where they going and from where they are come from. He imagines their little town, empty of its all citizens, and tells it that its streets will ''for evermore'' be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. The speaker searches the urn for a different kind of immortality. Beyond the fleeting passions of life and the abstract perfection of art exists religion, which attempts to synthesize nature, symbol, and experience within a single overriding principle. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it ,like Eternity, ''doth tease us out of thought.'' All these two scenes represented that the timeless perfection only art can capture.

Conclusion

Where there is the hero as poet continuing to strive, to seek, and to explore the truth, there is the hope of salvation. Poets like Keats and Yeats sought the meaning of life unceasingly. They made us understood our life is transient, but our works can be perpetual. If the "Sailing to Byzantium" portrays Yeats' engagement with the immortal soul in a symbolic place—Byzantium, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" portrays Keats' attempt to engage with the static immobility sculpture. The common point of the two poems is that the life of the art is immortal, while the life of human being or any other nature forms are mortal. Just like Shakespeare's sonnet 18 mentioned ''So long as men can breath or eyes can see/ So long lives this and this gives life to thee. '' A nice summer's day is usually transient, yet the beauty in poetry can last forever and the lover's beauty like the poetry will never fade. The art of the poetry just like Da Vinci 's Monalisa will smile for hundreds, thousands of years. Thus what mortal we do are to find the immortal in art which is the eternal home of the soul.

Works Cited

Hochman, Jhan. "An overview of “Sailing to Byzantium”." Poetry for Students. Detroit: Gale. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 June 2012. Jeffares. A. Norman. "The Byzantine Poems of W. B. Yeats." Review of English Studies 22.85 (1946): 44-52. Keats, John. Ode on a Grecian Urn in Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. 2004.
"Sailing to Byzantium."Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature.Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1995. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 June 2012.
Yeats, W. B. A Vision. New York: Macmillan, 1956.
Yeats, W.B. Sailing to Byzantium. in Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. 2004.