Body and Soul: Redefining Aging in T. S. Eliot’sand W. B. Yea

Abstract

This paper aims to compare T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) and W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927) by focusing on aging. Theological/philosophical perspectives connecting aging to wisdom prevailed in the Middle Ages and pre-modern periods. However, beginning from the nineteenth century and prevailing in the twentieth, the changed perspective of equating aging to the body replaced the previous view. This study focuses on this shifted sociocultural attitude mirrored in Eliot’s poem. In “Sailing to Byzantium,“ Yeats, in his early 60s, feeling physical aging, first leaves for the ideal Byzantium, where there is no cycle of birth, growth, and death. He leaves the decaying body and pursues the world of the soul and artistic completion symbolized by Byzantium, but eventually realizes that neither art nor the soul can exist by itself. The poet concludes that humans must return to this mortal body, the grieving real world, accept all the pain, and lead the body and the soul together in real life.