Symbolism and Style in Yeats' Byzantium and Joyce's The Dead

Symbolism and Style in Yeats' “Byzantium” and Joyce's “The Dead”

James Joyce and William Butler Yeats are perhaps the two most prominent modernist writers of the twentieth century, and both have left their unique stylistic legacies to English literature. Though these fellow Irishmen wrote at the same time, their drastically different styles reveal distinctions in their characters and standpoints, and comparing them provides intriguing glimpses into two deeply individual minds. One area in which an obvious difference in approach exists is the way each uses symbolism; whereas Yeats often uses a heavy symbolism placed in the foreground of his works to reveal broader truths and ideological beliefs, Joyce chooses a subtler method in which less visible symbols are woven into the fabric of the prose. Joyce’s closing story in the collection Dubliners, “The Dead,” is exemplary of his approach to symbolic imagery. Joyce repeatedly mentions the falling snow in an understated manner at carefully selected moments, slowly working its presence into the consciousness of the reader. In the final paragraphs, the snow is revealed as a symbol of significance, though still one of elusive meaning to a certain extent. Yeats’ poem “Byzantium” makes an interesting counterpart to “The Dead” because of not only the noticeable difference in style but also some ironic parallels between the two works.

In “Byzantium,” Yeats sets up a dichotomy of humanity versus a kind of higher order whose truths exist outside of the hopeless complexity of humans, with his symbolism carrying the bulk of the narrative weight in the poem. He describes an imagined nighttime scene at the Byzantine Emperor’s palace, and nearly all of the figures and images introduce...

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...til it is brought to the forefront of the work at the very end, mirroring the changing attitude and eventual revelation of the main character. Still, the two pieces have interesting parallels in the structure of their symbolism in that both open with a dichotomy and close with a homogenous image, and it is perhaps the differences that emerge from these similarities that are the most interesting and indicative of the writers’ symbolic styles. The fact that the human complexity Yeats rejects in his final image is exactly what makes Joyce’s finale possible shows a difference in ideological standpoints that is complimented by each writers’ style. Examining the use of symbolism in “Byzantium” and “The Dead” side by side provides an interesting way to view the two modernists, and the observations produced illustrate crucial aspects of both Yeats’ and Joyce’s perspectives.