The Tower

1928

Brasch PR5904 T69

London: Macmillan

If time travel was possible, Yeats says that he would spend his ‘month of antiquity … in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato’ (A Vision). He believed that the early Byzantines achieved a perfect union of ‘religion, aesthetic, and practical life.’ In ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ he travels to Byzantium in his imagination, and art transforms him into a golden bird, singing a song of ‘unaging intellect’ and beauty.