Postponement and Prophecy: Northrop Frye and “The Great Code” of Yeats’s “Byzantium”

The essay examines W.B. Yeats’s “Byzantium” in light of Northrop Frye’s ideas about the resonances of Biblical language, especially its typology and deferred revelation, in Western poetry. It argues that Yeats’s effort to communicate the eternal within time by combining proclamation and enigma, revelation and ambiguity, bears deep similarities to the process of signalling and postponing revelation that drives Biblical language. By examining the role of postponed and unverifiable final meaning in “Byzantium” via Frye, the essay also points out important intimacies and differences between post-structural theories of semiotic contingency and formalist, anthropological ideas about the distinct nature of poetic, metaphorical language.