W. B. Yeats

Parsing Time in the Lyric

“…W. B. Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium' starts by inhabiting a tense hinged between 'now' of enunciation and a timeless present ('That is no country for old men'), while the oxymoron of 'those dying generations' nicely complements the blurring of deictic and cyclical time. 21 The shift in tense at the close of the second stanza -'And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium'signals a move into narrative progression, as though to repudiate the gerundive of the title. 22 Any such progression, however, is tempered by the depiction of Byzantium itself as a mythic-historical non-place.…”

Beastly Blake

“…His transformation into a 'dark Hermaphrodite' is marked by scales spreading across his skin in the second version of Blake's emblem book, For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1793/1818). 44 In The Four Zoas both Orc and Urizen turn into hermaphroditic dragon forms. 45 This iconography marks the fallen form of the hermaphrodite, 'a hideous form / seen in the aggregate a Vast Hermaphroditic form', a sign of the separation of male and female emanations.…”