ABSTRACT

At the conclusion of W.B. Yeats's well-known lyric, Sailing to Byzantium, the aged speaker, having left behind the “dying generations” of the natural world, pictures himself “out of nature” and arriving at the “holy city of Byzantium.” Once there, he declares, he will not take his “bodily form from any natural thing,” but will assume a form like that of a bird made by goldsmiths from hammered gold and enameling-such a bird as serves “to keep a drowsy Emperor awake” or to sing “To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” As Yeats presents it, the artistry that fashions his golden bird and its song has much more in common with the poetic process of Chaucer's French contemporaries (designed to please fourteenth-century lords and ladies) than with the Romantic art of Yeats himself; indeed, the bird and the song provide an excellent image for Middle French poetry, which I follow Eustache Deschamps in identifying as “natural music.” In explaining natural music and its uses, this chapter provides a theoretical introduction to the subsequent historical survey of Chaucer's relationships to Middle French poetry.