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City of souls: Yeats's Byzantium as an imaginary place.

Article Excerpt
There are eight million stories in the naked city but no master narrative. Real cities are chaotic if not quite random, noisy and confused, immersed in what Dickens in Little Dorritt calls "the usual uproar." Imaginary cities, however, are not bound by the vagaries either of history or daily life and can take on any qualities that their creator chooses to give them. Since they come from one mind and express one sensibility, such places generally have an underlying principle that defines their nature, whether or not this is the creator's intention. In the case of "Byzantium," Yeats, haunted all his life by the mythology of pagan Ireland, managed the improbable feat of transforming an imperial capital on the Bosphorus into a version of the Celtic Otherworld.

To anyone but Yeats this conflation might seem strange, but it was his core belief that:

Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities That of race and that of soul And ancient Ireland knew it all. (Poems 325)

In particular, ancient Ireland knew that the world of the senses is coterminous with another, invisible world that is equally real but generally inaccessible to mortal men and women. This is just as well for the most part, since the inhabitants of the Otherworld, the sidhe, are dangerous simply through the intensity of their presence and even a glimpse of one of them, if not fatal immediately, can lead to a lifetime of wandering and obsession as in "Stories of Red Hanrahan" and "The Song of Wandering Aengus." Sometimes the domain of the sidhe is all around us, sometimes it is located in the faery mounds throughout Ireland, and sometimes it is an island or archipelago far to the West, in the ocean. It can be reached in a moment of transcendent insight, but more often through death, which is why it is so often visualized as underground or in the direction of the setting sun. The dancing spirits...

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