Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium In "The Desertion of the Circus Animals," WB Yeats stated that his images "[g]rew in pure mind" (630). But the golden bird of "Sailing to Byzantium" can make us feel that "pure mind", although convincing, is not a sufficient explanation. Where did that songbird come from? Yeats's creative eclecticism, fusing morning conversation with philosophical abstractions, makes the notion of one and only one source for any image implausible: see Frank O'Connor's comments on the genesis of "Lapis Lazuli", for example ( 211-22). We cannot discount Yeats's note to the poem: "I read somewhere that in the emperor's palace in Byzantium there was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang" (825), although his early four words sound suspiciously like the fragile cloak of respectability that Yeats threw over his most daring inventions. Some have suggested that the bird came from his reading of Byzantine history, from Gibbon, or even from Hans Christian Andersen (Jeffares 257). But it is worth considering a previously unrecognized source: Lear's consoling speech to Cordelia in the final act of the play, as they are led to prison and their deaths. Yeats was greatly moved by King Lear and referred to it with some frequency in print for over 40 years, with the references intensifying as he grew older. Whether he called it "crazy and profound" in February 1926 (Frayne and Johnson 464), several months before he wrote "Sailing to Byzantium," or whether he explicitly imagined himself as Lear, aged but ferocious, inspired by "frenzy," in ' "An Acre of Grass" - the play and the old king were powerful in his imagination. Thus, when we read Yeats' desire to be transfigured, we should turn again to King Lear: Once out of nature I... half of sheet ...onal: the old man, the artist, the parent, threatened by the inevitable; spoke to him of the power of art to combat the terrors of the world, whether one escaped prison by becoming a songbird or sang and prayed in a prison from which the only escape was death, art transformed by love was the most powerful human defense against evil and mortality. Works Cited Frayne, John P. and Cotton Johnson, eds Uncollected Prose by WB Yeats 2. New York: Columbia UP, 1975. Jeffares, A. Norman. A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, California: Stanford UP, 1968. O'Connor, Frank. My father's son. New York: Knopf, 1969.Shakespeare, William. King Lear Ed. Kenneth Muir. London: Methuen, 1971.Yeats, William Butler. The Variorum edition of the poems of WB Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1973.