Disappointing Utopian Vision of W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most of the critical literature and readings of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, both form or content wise, focus on the aesthetic, spiritual or symbolic aspects of the poem, with occasional allusions to the biography of the writer. This research, apart from the allusive imagery and symbolic structure, presents a more critical view of the text. It attempts to highlight self-contradictory and irreconcilable outcome as well as paradoxical representations of both imagined spaces that have rarely been considered or examined. This article, therefore, analyzes the inconsistencies resulting from readers’ expectations that stem from the outcomes of such mythical vision and what is unfolding by the end of the poem. The research shows that the speaker’s disillusionment with his society, the fantasy of the body transcendence and the spatiotemporal idealization of Byzantium are based on false premises and fail the expectation of readers. These inconsistencies, the research argues, are the manifestation of the poet’s desideratum for an immediate and perennial consolation of the suffering from life at old age and resort to the pleasure of art and beauty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".