Reading Byzantium by Yeats, not the well-known, stately Sailing to Byzantium, but a later incomprehensible blizzard of disconnected images, in a gloss by Helen Vendler. My first reactions: disorientation and irritation. References to cathedral domes, mummies, birds, dolphins, gong-tormented sea. What to make of it? Repetitious phrases: fury and mire, mire and blood, complexities of fury... Words without resonance for me but repeated obsessively. What is this:"An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve"? A sleeve? And "smithies breaking the flood"? Huh? Nothing but stubbornness compels me to finish reading the long column of non-melodic, off-rhymed verse.
Vendler's approach is to divide the poem into parts, note this pattern, count and tabulate, trace the flow, the appearances and disappearances. My first reading was disaster. The second less exasperating. She argues Yeats is making an argument of images, rather than of propositions, a poetic exploration of the question of life and after-life. Her position: a great poet writes poems worthy of time spent in explication.
Explication of an argument in imagery over the course of a set of lines and stanzas. This is not the work I usually do or expect to do reading a poem, but perhaps my aspirations for the encounter are too modest, perhaps I lack faith in poems or poets, perhaps I'm lazy.
I still don't like the poem much, though I understand it better, many thanks to the commentator. The images still seem disjoint; none rings in my mind like a bell. I've a better sense of what to do with such a poem, though: take out my pen, or better highlighters, and mark.
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