In his poem “Sailing to Byzantium” written when he was in his early sixties, Yeats renounces the world of youth and sensuality, where he is but a “A tattered coat upon a stick,” and sails (metaphorically) “To the holy city Byzantium.” Once there, he envisions being wrought into an ancient mosaic, his “being” freed from its bodily prison, and absorbed into an “artifice of eternity.” This idea of escaping the infirmities of the body and the finality of death is ultimately the most natural and powerful of all our human desires. As Yeats states,
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a from as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
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.
As the poem concludes, he sees himself transformed into an immutable work of art with the visionary comprehension of the past, the present and the future. One might think this brilliant poem settles Yeats’s philosophy on life, death, and afterlife; but even as The Tower, the collection in which “Sailing to Byzantium” was included, was still in galleys (201), Yeats was writing poems that shifted away (200-201) from escaping into a work of art to a desire be reborn into the physical body. His poem, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” performs a debate between escaping cycle of death and rebirth (to achieve nirvana) or to live life all over again. “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” expresses the desire to be reborn rather than become a pure bodiless spirit. This desire to relive life's vicissitudes and accept even what the body will become as one ages, propels the momentum of the Self’s rebuttal to the Soul’s summoning for it to surrender to the darkness of an afterlife with no return.
Part 1 of the dialogue begins with the Soul summoning the Self to “Set all your mind upon the steep ascent” and contemplate the “winding ancient stair" to the spiritual world, the way to pure spiritual existence. The Self’s immediate response is to concentrate on “Sato’s ancient blade,” to relish its “Still razor keen” edge, and “That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn/From some court lady’s dress,” symbols of vitality and fertility.
The debate continues with the Soul questioning why “the imagination of a man/Long past his prime remember things that are/Emblematical of love and war?” The Soul urges the self to
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth?
And the intellect its wandering
To this and that and t’other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
The Self names the maker of the sword, Montashigi in the next stanza. Then, together with the imagery of the fabric covering the sword, he asserts a right to refuse release from his body, and reject the ascent up the tower to the spiritual realm. The Soul attempts one more time to persuade the Self to surrender the body and rise to that “Heaven” where “Only the dead can be forgiven.” But in a remarkable reversal of what the reader encounters in “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats categorically rejects the escape from the physical world, longs instead to “live it all again,” and welcomes even “The ignominy,” the “clumsiness,” the “enemies,” “the wintry blast,” and “The folly that man does.” He is “content” with the totality of life, capable of forgiving himself, and casting out “remorse.” Once he does so,
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
Here again is a link to the poem: A Dialogue of Self and Soul