Commentary:

Yeats starts out with the image of a falcon wheeling

about in the sky, far away from the falconer who

released it. The bird continues to wheel and gyre

further and further away from the falconer. This

metaphor stands for the young people who have given up

the standards of their parents and grandparents for

the new art, the new literature, the new music, and

the other novelties of Yeats' time. The poem was

composed in 1920.

There is another interpretation of the falcon-falconer

image, and that is the image of the head or intellect

as the falcon and the rest of the body and the body

sensations and feelings (heart) as the falconer.

This idea is reinforced and repeated later in the

poem when Yeats brings in the image of the Sphinx,

which is a re-connection of these two components. In

the image of the Sphinx, the head-intellect is

connected to the body. That is the Sphinx isn't

broken apart. The giant......

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Title: Byzantium
Approximate Word Count: 848
Approximate Pages: 4 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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