'O Flies Standing In God's Holy Marmalade': "Sailing to Byzantium" (1927)

A novel-length post on Yeats's poem: an exercise in Marmaladic Criticism

I first read ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ as a young man, in the mid-1980s. I read it now as an old man in my tattered coat and paltryness. I was pretty miserable back in the 80s, and am much happier now, so that is a change for the better. Not so Yeats:

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.

That country, rather than the closer-to-hand this country: the first word of the poem indicating the alienation the speaker feels. The joyous young, in their world of love and sex. The blithe birds singing. But why are the birds and the young those dying generations? The old-man/speaker is the one dying, surely. The birds and the young are living. I suppose Yeats is, in this phrase, folding together life and death, life as a process that is always on its way towards death—the sex implied by line 1-2 leading to a new life ‘begotten’ to be ‘born’ and so, in time, to die. And I suppose Yeats says this to contrast the becoming and departing of life with the ‘intellect’, which he claims does not age, constructing its enduring ‘monuments’, although they are monuments the living, caught up in the passing joys of the moment, ignore. ‘Dying generation’ looks like an oxymoron: death being the opposite of generating new life—although Yeats’s poem suggests not so, that generation (the word goes back to the Latin genero, ‘to beget, procreate, produce’, from genus, ‘birth, origin, lineage, kind, type, race’) and begetting (a different verbal genealogy: ‘from Old English beġietan, ‘to get, to find, seize’) are both iterations of death. Death is born with us; death seizes us.

Yeats was sixty when he wrote this poem, a year older than I am now. Sixty isn’t perhaps very old, although it was apparently old enough for Yeats to have a sense of alienation from the young, their extraordinary beauty and vivacity and wonder.  ‘The salmon-falls’ is at once indicative of salmon leaping energetically up waterfalls as they strive and swim back to their spawning grounds, and, sonically, a sentence with a subject and a verb: the salmon falls. Rise and fall folded into one another. Not every salmon manages the obstacle course upstream, and those that do are not the young, but precisely the old, for whom spawning (‘the young in one another’s fins’) is an immediate prelude to dying. Then there’s that splendid, almost Homeric epithet: ‘the mackerel-crowded seas’. Fish again, because Yeats’ mind is running on sex, and fishiness has slangy connotations for woman’s sex. Salmon in the rivers, and mackerel—Scombridae, a pelagic fish—in the seas and oceans. Mackerel have been catastrophically over-fished over recent decades, to the point where whole populations are collapsing; but Yeats in 1926 invokes them as a kind of shorthand for progenitivity, the massive spawning shoals of them that used to throng to ocean, generation in extreme form, generation to the max. Nobody is sure where the name mackerel comes from, etymologically speaking: it might be derived from the Latin macula (‘stain, spot’), because of the spotty patterning on their skin (though that’s hardly unique to this particular species of fish). I wonder if, on some, perhaps, subconscious level, Yeats wasn’t prompted by the Irish-surname quality of the word: McErel, MacEarl. That country is Ireland, after all. But Yeats is going to leave it.

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.

The singing soul, here, recalls the singing birds in stanza 1. Monuments are mentioned again, followed by a wrongfooting ‘therefore’—linking a non sequitur in the stanza’s final couplet. Old men, like Yeats in 1926, like me in 2024, are really just skinny-as-a-skeleton stick-like bodies clothed in tattered dress: that’s all an old man is, except for something that is not stick-skinny, not tattered, not even old: the soul. Clap hands, sing aloud, the soul-song a kind of repudiation of the tattered coat, which is itself a synecdoche for the decay of mortal flesh more generally. One thing that doesn’t seem to have been noticed about this phrase, ‘soul clap its hands’ is that Yeats has taken it from Browning:

Living we fret

Dying we live:

Fretless and free,

Soul clap thy pinion!

Earth have dominion,

Body, o'er thee! …

Soul that canst soar! [Browning, ‘Pisgah-Sights’, Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper (1876)]

Yeats’s soul claps its hands, Browning’s claps its wings, but both are birds, both sing and escape: and at the end Yeats’s soul becomes a special kind of golden bird.

How does our soul learn to sing this unaging song?  It is not taught by others, says Yeats. One learns the song by ‘studying monuments of one’s soul’s own magnificence’. I stare at that line and I can’t make sense of it. Did Yeats’s soul really bask in the glory of its own monumental magnificence? How could such a Trumpian, egoistical sensibility ever also recognise its own senescence, its belated irrelevance in the face of the young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees? Still, off to Byzantium he goes.

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.

We picture the poet standing before a Byzantine artwork, the mosaics of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople: representations of holy men, halo’d, set in gold and orange reminiscent of flames, a Pentecostal fire. The poem calls them to step out of this static, gorgeous artifice, to spin around (‘perne’ means: to spin, to gyrate—Yeats has invented this verb from the noun pern, a conical spool onto which the thread is wound from the spindle on a spinning wheel; and ‘gyre’ is a helical or tornado-shape, a swirling vortex). But now it seems there is a singing school, contradicting the previous stanza’s insistence that ‘there is no singing school except studying monuments of the soul’s own magnificence’. The school turns out to be: holy men out of Byzantine mosaics. ‘Consume my heart away’ is, I suppose, addressed to the holy men, a request: consume in the sense of burn up, following on from the holy fire: heart, in the sense not of the physical organ but the soul—though the soul is sick with unfulfilled desire, and trapped in this dying body, and does not know itself. Unreciprocated desire, physical decrepitude, self-ignorance: the three marks of being an old man. Yeats proposes to burn the soul in a refiner’s fire, not to destroy it but to purge it of impuritites—these three things—so that Yeats can join the holy men in the artifice of eternity, as part of the mosaic.

The half-rhymes ‘wall’/‘soul’/‘animal’, in this stanza, sticks out somewhat, not least because Yeats laces this stanza with such a spread of internal rhymes: fire—fire—gyre—desire; be—me—eternity; O—holy—gold—holy—soul—know…me; come—consume. It’s a very rhymey eight lines of poetry, except for where it is supposed to actually rhyme, at the end of its lines. There are other near-rhymes in other portions of the poem: in the first stanza ‘young’/‘song’ and ‘trees’/‘sees’/‘dies’; in the second ‘unless’ and ‘dress’ are rhymed with ‘magnificence’, which is pretty bold. But ‘soul’ and ‘animal’ rhyme neither in sound nor stress (soul is a stressed syllable, almost a disyllable, -mal an unstressed single syllable). We could say that the linking of the two draws out the anima inside the word animal (the English word is from the Latin animal, which in turn comes from anima, ‘breath, spirit’). And wall rhymes with neither. Perhaps the point is to emphasise these words by making then stand out from the smoothness of the rhyme-scheme. Soul, animal and wall are all important.

The wall, with its gorgeous, golden and glittering mosaics is a synecdoche for the whole of Byzantium, its physical existence, its solidity and endurance. When Byzantium finally fell to the Ottomans, 29^th May 1453, the mosaics of the Hagia Sophia stopped being functioning Christian icons, the church being converted into the mosque it remains today. But the mosaics were preserved. In Edwin A. Grosvenor’s Constantinople (1895), a book Yeats surely knew, the story is told:

Sultan Mohammed II was never more profound, more philosophic, more truly great, than on the day of conquest. An Ottoman soldier, in the intoxication of victory or fanaticism, was destroying the mosaics in Sancta Sophia with his mace. “Let those things be!” the Conqueror cried. With a single blow he stretched the barbarian motionless at his feet. Then, in a lower tone, he added, so the historian declares, “Who knows but in another age they may serve another religion than that of Islam?”  … In the legend of the common people, a Greek priest was celebrating the liturgy when the exultant army of the Sultan burst through the doors. Taking the cross in his hand, the priest slowly withdrew to one of the secret chambers, and there, with the cross, is waiting still! [Edwin A. Grosvenor, Constantinople (2 vols: Boston 1895), 2:495-6]

The holy man goes, literally, into the wall: into a secret chamber within the wall, where he will wait, out of time, holding the cross. The holy men represented in the mosaics are also literally ‘in’ the wall. Yeats is going ‘into’ the material fabric of Byzantium in another way: abandoning his flesh to become something dazzlingly, gorgeously artificial.

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.

Past, the passing present, the future: an oracular bird, made of gold and gold enamel—a robot, we might say, except that it is ensouled by the spirit of Yeats himself. Not an automaton but an anima-tomaton. The birds in the trees at the beginning of the poem are mirrored by this artificial bird in its artificial tree. In this final stanza Yeats pushes the internal rhyming further, into self-rhyme, repetitions of the same word: nature/natural—form/form—goldsmiths/gold/gold/golden. Suited to the monotony of the eternal. Of the mosaics in the Hagia Sophia, Grosvenor notes their everlasting quality: ‘glittering with gold, mosaic, and rarest marble, it seemed as if human resource and invention could achieve nothing more in overpowering gorgeousness and splendor.’

Why sailing to Byzantium? An actual Byzantine person, from the time of the Imperial court, or a crafty Greek craftsmen, could hardly get in a plane and fly, of course. Anyone leaving Ireland must cross the seas, at least to the Continent (and why not the whole way?) The Greek would be εἰς Βυζάντιον πλέων (this last word the present active participle of πλέω pléō, I sail), a phrase which, Google tells me, crops up once only in classical literature, at least in this precise form [there are other instances of ‘he sailed to Byzantium’ or ‘they sailed to Byzantium’; but only one for εἰς Βυζάντιον πλέων. It occurs in Demosthenes’ Against Stephanus (c.348 BC). This is a law-court speech which aims to demonstrate that the individual named had born false witness in a previous law-suit, and that he should be convicted of perjury. Of Stephanus, Demosthenes says:

Φορμίωνα δὲ πάλιν ἑόρακεν καὶ τούτῳ γέγονεν οἰκεῖος, ἐξ Ἀθηναίων ἁπάντων τοῦτον ἐκλεξάμενος, καὶ ὑπὲρ τούτου πρεσβευτὴς μὲν ᾤχετ᾽ εἰς Βυζάντιον πλέων, ἡνίκ᾽ ἐκεῖνοι τὰ πλοῖα τὰ τούτου κατέσχον, τὴν δὲ δίκην ἔλεγεν τὴν πρὸς τοὺς Καλχηδονίους. [Against Stephanus, 5:64]

After this he courted [wealthy merchant] Phormio and became his intimate, selecting him out of all the Athenians, and sailing to Byzantium as commercial agent in his interest when the Byzantines detained Phormio's ships, to plead his case against the Calchedonians.

J. E. Sandys: ‘Phormion, it seems, must have been implicated in some mercantile suit with people at Calchedon (opposite Byzantium). The affair is not alluded to elsewhere.’ It seems an unlikely intertext for Yeats—although George Moore famously compared Yeats to Demosthenes, in his rhetorical skill at pleading the Irish cause. Max Beerbohm has rather cruel fun with this, claiming to have heard Yeats deliver a speech ‘at the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin; that fighting speech of which George Moore has gasped’:

 Yes, it made Moore gasp. Perhaps posterity will be equally stirred. At the Shelbourne Hotel it sounded very beautiful. But no dons of Trinity, nor any of the Catholics either, were any more offended by it than they would have been by a nocturne of Chopin. Mournfully, very beautifully, Yeats bombinated in the void, never for an instant in any vital relation to the audience. Moore likens him to Demosthenes. But I take it that Demosthenes swayed multitudes. Yeats swayed Moore.

What Demosthenes’ ‘sailing to Byzantium’ reminds us is less legal, or political, and more mercantile: that Byzantium was not just an aesthetic location, a site of gorgeous golden mosaics, but a trading city, a place in commercial interrelation with the rest of the world.

We might say that this is not the image of Byzantium that draws Yeats:

It seems clear that in this poem Byzantium represents what for Yeats was an ideal social order in which a creative spiritual life for all would be possible. He contrasts this unfavourably with his own contemporary civilisation which seemed to him increasingly non-spiritual, materialistic and decadent. Yeats was a highly intelligent man but in some respects he was, to say the least, naïve. His ideal society would have been one consisting only of aristocrats and peasants, devoid of the merchant and the clerk, the corrupting middle class he despised. He was not a fascist but did flirt spasmodically with right-wing political movements. He became disillusioned with all of them. As a Senator he was obliged to be active in Irish political affairs but withheld from politics in the party sense.

He was, however, an unapologetic elitist. He believed that the ability to maintain the highest social and cultural standards in a society – qualities vital for its wellbeing – was possessed by very few people and that everyone in society should aid and abet those few people in their essential task. In conversation with the playwright Sean O’Casey he declared: ‘Whatever the State, there must be a governing class placed by wealth above fear and toil.’ It follows that Yeats believed democracy to be a major contributor to the contemporary decline in social and cultural standards. What society needed was a firmly rooted but enlightened aristocracy with the wealth and leisure to do its job, supported by a compliant and loyal working class.

Wealth, though, does not come from nowhere. Byzantium was wealthy because of trade, positioned as it was at the bridge of Europe and Asia, the sea-lanes out of the Mediterranean to and from the Black Sea. Empires are about wealth, power, control of the material exigencies of social existence. They are not, primarily, about ingeniously-made bejewelled automata, or even about art in the larger sense. This is not what Yeats wants us to think about: not, we could say, the valence of ‘Byzantium’ he wants the poem to evoke. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t read the poem in such terms. What is the Greek craftsman but a merchant, a purveyor of luxury goods to the super-rich? What is the emperor, drowsy after a fine meal, but the apex of a structure of wealth-acquisition? This is also a part of what Byzantium signifies: and old men tend to be richer than the young.

Here is the Peacock Clock at the Russian State Hermitage Museum, sitting in its golden tree, which might have been on Yeats’s mind. It is a golden, singing robot-bird, built in 1777 by celebrated jeweller and automaton-builder Englishman James Cox. It arrived in Russia in 1797 and was for a time owned by Prince Grigory Potemkin, the secret husband of Catherine the Great. It still works, apparently: I haven’t seen it myself, but apparently it sings to this day to entertain visitors to the Hermitage. It is ‘the only large example of 18th-century robotics to have survived unaltered into the 21st century.’ But Cox was a tradesman first of all, who made his bejewelled and golden automata to sell, and did so with such success that it aided Britain’s 18th-century balance of payments problem: ‘Cox's popularity was important to British trade: the tea trade ensured that British imports far outweighed their exports to China, and Cox helped redress the imbalance. His sing-songs initially reduced British trade deficit.’

What about the marmalade, though?

Come at it this way: Yeats is doing a Keatsy thing in this poem. Many critics have explored the connections between Keats’s ‘Nightingale’ and Yeats’s golden bird, between the realm of art described in ‘On a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ [J L Jones, ‘Keats and Yeats: “Artificers of the Great Moment”, Xavier University Studies 4 (1965), 125-50; Jones, Adam’s Dream: Mythic Consciousness in Keats and Yeats (Athens Georgia 1975); René Fréchet, ‘“Sailing to Byzantium” and Keats’s “Ode to the Nightingale” in D e S Maxwell and S B Bushrui (eds) W B Yeats 1865-19656: Centenary Essays on the Art of W B Yeats (1965), 217-19, D Eggenschwiler, ‘Nightingales and Byzantine Birds: Something Less than Kind’, English Language Notes 8 (1971), 186-91]. Like Yeats’s golden professor-yaffle, Keats’s Nightingale, singing its beautiful songs, is an avatar of art ‘not born for death’:

immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Both Yeats’s poem and Keats’s are about the eternity of beauty, of art. And ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ celebrates unambiguously the undying artifice that Keats explores in his ‘Grecian Urn’ ode, although there the beauty of the work of art, perfect forever, and contrasted with the misery pain and transience of actual life, is also a sterility, a monotony, an endless nonconsummation. Keats delights in the two beautiful lovers represented on the side of the urn, who will forever be young and beautiful and in love, but he also recognises them as icons of tantalising non-consummation: ‘bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,/Though winning near the goal.’ That ‘she cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair’ is scant consolation. Keats understands that, as he puts it in the ‘Ode to Melancholy’, only that person ‘whose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine’ can fully enjoy beauty, love, life. You can put a grape in your mouth, and hold it there as long as you like, without enjoying its taste and sweetness; once you bite into it, the taste and the sweetness are yours, although by doing so you destroy the grape and it passes away. Joy’s hand is ever at its lips, bidding adieu.

Yeats is altogether more positive on the whole eternal artifice things, perhaps because he has, in effect, turned his back on sexual desire, removing himself from the natural process of logic of generation—in contrast to the unconsummated desire that runs through ‘Grecian Urn’, and through Keats’s tortured life. Yeats sees no downside in being whirled into the gold mosaic there to exist, beautifully, for ever: or transformed into the golden robot-bird, to sing sexlessly and beautifully through past present and future. Keats knows that the eternity of beauty offered by the urn is not an eternity of satisfaction: an eternity, rather, of nonconsummation, of unvivacity. But Yeats is happy with that: happy to give up the transience of life, the miseries of aging flesh, the isolation of not belonging, in return for metallic artifice, the creation of song, unaging undeath. Doesn’t mean he is right, though.

Morrissey sang, in ‘Cemetery Gates’:

A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetery gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
While Wilde is on mine

The twist at the end of the song is that Morrissey’s friend ‘loses’ this poetic contest, Keats and Yeats may be their favourites, but ‘whale-blubber Wilde is on my side’. It’s the earnestness, the overrichness, the studied poeticism of Yeats and Keats that Morrissey is deprecating, although the context here is death, the cemetery gates. Pale, skinny Keats dying before his time; fat, witty Wilde dying before his: but Wilde meeting his death ironically, wittily, stylishly: eyeing at the cheap wallpaper in his bedroom, ‘one of us will have to go’ and so on. This is not Yeats’s manner. The whole of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is an elevation, a dignifying and spiritualising of language, and life. Wilde was as dedicated to beauty as Yeats or Keats, but his creative imagination was self-aware, ironic, amusing.

Yeats and Keats. In 1918 Yeats published ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ (‘I am your lord’) a preface-in-verse to his collection of essays Per Amica Silentia Lunae. In it two characters HIC and ILLE discuss the poetry of Dante, Keats and Yeats himself: hic is Latin for ‘here, this’, and ille is ‘that, there’, though Ezra Pound identified ILLIE as ‘Willie’, that is, Yeats himself. Yeats is that, not this—which takes us back to the first line of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: not this country, but that country. In ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ Yeats differentiates himself from Keats. That is no Keats-y for old men—Keats never reached old age, after all.

HIC

And yet,

No one denies to Keats love of the world,

Remember his deliberate happiness.

.

ILLE

His art is happy, but who knows his mind?

I see a schoolboy, when I think of him,

With face and nose pressed to a sweetshop window,

For certainly he sank into his grave,

His senses and his heart unsatisfied;

And made—being poor, ailing and ignorant,

Shut out from all the luxury of the world,

The ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper—

Luxuriant song.

Pretty condescending, to Keats, this. Yeats believes he was too much in the world, or more precisely too enamoured of it, even as his circumstances and health and poverty cut him off from the delights he yearned for. Immediately before this exchange, HIC suggests that poetry is not the way to celebrate the world, if one loves the world:

HIC

Yet surely there are men who have made their art

Out of no tragic war; lovers of life,

Impulsive men, that look for happiness,

And sing when they have found it.

.

ILLE

No, not sing,

For those that love the world serve it in action,

Grow rich, popular, and full of influence;

And should they paint or write still is it action,

The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,

The sentimentalist himself; while art

Is but a vision of reality.

What portion in the world can the artist have,

Who has awakened from the common dream,

But dissipation and despair?

So here, at last, is the marmalade: with a fly stuck in it, no less. There is nothing beautiful, no poetry, in such an image, says Yeats; but that is what the world-workers look like to him.

‘The struggle of the fly in marmalade’ is a phrase Yeats heard from Paul Verlaine when he visited him in Paris in 1894. The elderly poet told the younger, ‘I live in Paris like a fly in a pot of marmalade’. Or so Yeats recorded in his memoir The Trembling of the Veil (1922: p 215), back-forming a history for the line in the Per Amica poem. Verlaine presumably meant to deprecate his own late decadence and artistic ineffectiveness: he’s happy enough, with lots of sugary stuff to eat, but stuck, bogged down, unproductive (Verlain doesn’t say he is struggling, we might note). Earlier in Trembling Yeats speaks of ‘the Tragic Generation’ of fin de siècle poets—he mentions Edward Dowson and Lionel Johnson, but Verlaine is part of his larger account—who ‘fell to dissipation and despair, with no modern creative capital’ [Trembling, 189].

Here’s the thing, though: ‘Je vis comme une mouche dans un pot de marmelade’ is not a common French phrase. But ‘comme une mouche dans le confiture’ very much is. Happy as a fly in jam. Enjoying the red, purple or black sweetstuff, though stuck there. (That the English equivalent is probably ‘happy as a pig in shit’ says something about our respective cultures). I suspect comme une mouche dans un pot de confiture is what Verlaine actually said to Yeats, and that the marmaladic specificity was imported into the memory by Yeats’s imagination. And those colours, the golden-shred, the orange and yellows, are the selfsame ones that suffuse ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. The fly in the marmalade, the high-and-holy in the golden wall: it’s a question of degree, of scale. The saint, turning, perning, gyre-vortexing his way out of the gold mosaic to reach Yeats, only to draw him back into the matter of the wall, looks rather like a grander, an epic version of the fly, turning and struggling and flapping gyres with his wings, to escape the matrix of sugared-orange gel. Conversely, Yeats’s saints whirling their wings out of the mosaic are mock-heroically diminished by the fly-in-marmalade line, a kind of Rape of the Lock logic.

I am not being merely facetious in drawing the parallel. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ makes the grandiose claim that, by abstracting himself into the gold mosaic of the wall, or turning himself into piece of gorgeous aestheticized artifice, Yeats will be able to ‘sing’—because he has removed himself from the world. This, I suppose, is what the ‘learn to sing by studying the soul’s own monuments’ line means in the first stanza: emphasis on soul, looking inward, away from the world’s monuments. But Keats knows better: art is beautiful, but one cannot live in it, because life cannot be static, fixed, even in terms of a beautiful fixity. It is the Holy Men in the mosaics who are the flies in the marmalade: trapped, stuck, in howsoever sweet and golden an idiom.

Or to take it in a different direction. The fly in marmalade is close cousin to the fly in amber: amber as sticky, sweet sap, attracting the fly, swallowing it and turning it—without exaggeration—into an actual avatar of timelessness, eternity. Those creatures in themselves neither rich nor rare/But we wonder how the devil they got there, as Alexander Pope put it. Except, to follow through the associative logic of Yeats’s avaian-C3PO, his high tech intervention into nature, product of intricate engineering and clever techne—Jurassic Park. Thou wast not born for death, immortal T-Rex/No hungry generations deny the evolutionary connection between dinosaurs and birds. ‘Sailing to …’ Byzantium is a paeon, [u — u u]; and so is Jurassic-park:

That is no theme-park for old men, the young

Running away in fear, monsters amok—

The dino generations—roaring strong

The shrieks and yells,  velociraptor-shock.

Yeats would not lower himself to parody, or irony, of course. But Wilde might. And I hold to the argument that Jurassic Park is not unrelated to Keats’s Nightgale and Grecian Urn odes, or to Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. It is also a text about transience, the passing-away of things, and the use of ingenuity and art to reverse that extinction, to create a permanent bird-like avatar of undying-ness. The dinosaurs of the park are marvellous creations: people travel from all around the world just to look at them—and they are also, like Cox’s automata, commercial propositions, lucrative. And on another level, the special effects Spielberg emplyed in his 1993 movie to recreate the dinosaurs visually was remarked upon at the time as marvellous, a brilliant technical achievement. But the film is also saying: these ingeniousy-wrought entities are wrong, a violation, against nature. As Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm says, ‘Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction … your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.’ The film literalises this wrongness with, of course, the park’s security malfunctioning, the dinosaurs breaking out and terrorising and killing those in the park. Keats’s ode isn’t so literal-minded or melodramatic; but it also recognises the dangers of eternity. Yeats’s Byzantisaur is a different matter.