Yeats received a letter from Sturge Moore complaining about the way he dealt with the goldsmith's bird in his “Sailing to Byzantium”. After Yeats had done a complete version of “Byzantium”, he wrote to Sturge Moore saying, "The poem originates from a criticism of yours." He added that the idea needed exposition. The focus of this paper is to discuss what that idea was which needed exposition. Frank Kermode maintained that Yeats wrote the latter poem to make more absolute the distinction between the goldsmith's bird as the Image and the natural bird. On the other hand, A. E. Dyson argued that Moore's criticism "can be safely ignored." Balancing these two contrary views, we have to rely on what Yeats himself implies as to this topic. What Yeats has to say about Byzantium as a symbolic city can be found in his poem itself and in his book A Vision. In the poem, we find the following expressions, "A Starlet or moonlit dome disdains / All that man is, / All mere complexities / The fury and the mire of human veins." As is evident to all Yeats students, a starlet night is a moonless night, phase 1 (complete objectivity) and a moonlit night is a full moon (complete subjectivity) in his system. These two phases represent superhuman purity. At these two phases human life cannot exist; for all human life entails a mixture of the subjective and the objective, hence "mere complexities." But their importance lies in the fact that they point to two different directions for human beings to pursue perfection. He wrote in his A Vision, "in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one." In addition, we have a great dome, symbolic of inclusiveness and the process of purgation in stanzas 4 and 5. We can infer that Yeats tried to represent Byzantium as an ideal city where "religious, aesthetic and practical life" are lived out in harmony with the vision of perfection available to man. But as night becomes day in Byzantium itself, "unpurged images" will surge upon the streets of Byzantium, and so goes on and on the process of purgation.

• 우철환(고려대) | Woo, Cheol Hwan