Theorizing about Ireland from within a postcolonial discourse is a necessarily problematic endeavor.  From one
perspective, Ireland ’s history for most of the twentieth century has been inherently characteristic of numerous other
emergent colonial nations.  Through the indigenous culture’s experiences with linguistic and ideological oppression at
the hands of an outside colonizing agency, Ireland resembles countless colonial states that have undergone similar
subjugation(forced submission to control by others). 
The virtual eradication of the native Irish language prior to the nineteenth century and the practically complete
chANGE of Irish literature to the British canon for most of the twentieth century parallel similar events in many
African and Caribbean colonial states.  Moreover, the resultant rise in Ireland ’s sense of national identity as a moment
of resistance to the British Empire has served as an exemplar for several other colonial nation states.
Ultimately, Ireland does represent the emergent colonial nation; however, it must also simultaneously
reflect the complex image of a heterogeneous people complicit to varying degrees with the colonial enterprise. 
Because of the country’s singular amalgamation of colonizer and colonized, of the oppressed who are
simultaneously a part of the oppressive apparatus, Ireland occupies a unique position among colonial nation states. 
Much like his Irish homeland, William Butler Yeats presents the postcolonial critic with a similarly complex
image of the Irish artist as an agent of decolonization.  At times, he and his works not only epitomize the struggles
and concerns of other colonial writers, but they also serve as a touchstone in the postcolonial endeavor.
…………………………………
Another important motif for Yeats that similarly suggests his desire to find a Third Way between these
antithetical elements in his life is the Byzantium motif.  For Yeats, Byzantium exemplifies the ideal
community: one that has resolved all culturally oppositional elements. 
According to Lloyd, “ Byzantium represented for Yeats a culture which had achieved ‘Unity
of Being’” (61). 
In A Vision, Yeats identifies Byzantium during the rule of Justinian with the fifteenth phase of his Great
Wheel; it is “a phase of complete beauty. . . .  Thought and will are indistinguishable, effort and attainment
are indistinguishable . . . all thought has become image” (135-36). 
Byzantium represents the ultimate society for Yeats; the national and the aesthetic have melded into
one: I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic
and practical life were one, that architect and artificers . . . spoke to the multitude and the few alike.  The
painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books, were almost
impersonal, almost perhaps without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject-matter
and that the vision of a whole people . . . the work of many that seemed the work of one, that made building,
picture, pattern, metal-work of rail and lamp, seem but a single image. . . .  (Vision 279-80)

Consequently, “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium”—the two poems most clearly identified
with this motif—attest not merely to Yeats’s desire for an escape from his sick and aging corporeal essence,
but also for an escape from a society quickly abandoning the bourgeois Unity of Culture for which Yeats has
sought for years. 
According to Catherine Belsey, “the politics [of Byzantium ] would have appealed to Yeats as the
spokesman of a decaying aristocracy” (7).  The Byzantium motif allows Yeats to retreat into a space where
art and artificer are one, resolving his struggle to incorporate the disparate elements of his nationalism with
his aestheticism.  As Yeats concludes in A Vision, “I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave
to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and
closed the Academy of Plato” (279). 
            Undercutting the Swan and Byzantium motifs, however, are Yeats’s own imperial imaginings of a
purely aestheticized representation of the Orient. 
In “Stories,” Robartes claims that he bought Leda’s third egg from “an old man in a green turban in Arabia,
or Persia , or India ” (Vision 51). 
 Robartes’s failure to remember precisely where he purchased the egg underscores the fact that for much of
the West, the Orient is represented as an amorphous and exoticized land.  Its people and lands were not as
important as their representation in Western culture. 
According to Said, “‘the Arab’ or ‘Arabs’ have an aura of . . . collective self-consistency such as to
wipe out any traces of individual Arabs with narratable life histories. . . . [and] Yeats’s visions of Byzantium
. . . [are] associated with Arab perdurability, as if the Arab had not been subject to the ordinary processes of
history” (Orientalism 229-30). 
Similarly, Yeats’s understandings of Byzantium devolve from “W.G. Holmes’s book, The Age of
Justinian and Theodora” (Belsey 90), a sort of “guide book” representing an Orientalized portrait of
Byzantium .  So Yeats bases and portrays his images of Byzantium on an exoticized representation of the
Orient.  In this vein, Yeats appears more closely aligned with the colonizer than with any agency of
decolonization.  Hence, while even trying to escape the tensions between the opposing gyres of nationalism
and aestheticism in his life, Yeats ultimately reifies them through his imperially constructed representations
of the Orient.  In the end, his efforts to reconcile these antithetical gyres, like his attempts to forge a Unity of
Culture, remain unresolved.