Holy Icon

"Sailing to Byzantium: W. B. Yeats", acrylic on gesso board, 9 × 12 inches, Bishop Maxim, 2026

William Butler Yeats is portrayed as a poet of vision, poised between the visible world and the realm of symbol and imagination. His luminous gaze and windswept golden hair suggest the restless spiritual longing that shaped both his life and poetry. The golden background, together with the faint outlines of a domed church and a radiant city, recalls Sailing to Byzantium, one of his most celebrated poems.

For Yeats, Byzantium represented more than a historical city. It became a symbol of artistic perfection and spiritual transformation—a place where beauty, wisdom, and faith endure beyond the passage of time. Rather than depicting the poet in a specific setting, this portrait seeks to evoke the inner landscape from which his poetry emerged: a world where memory, myth, and transcendence meet in a single vision.