The Gaze of History through William Logan’s “Fall of Byzantium”
Image Source: iStock photo Christian mosaic in Hagia Sophia
BY STAFF WRITER KATIE ROHRBAUGH ‘24
William Logan’s Night Battle is a collection of contemporary poetry, published in 1999—yet it undoubtedly finds weight through a careful selection of classical historical references and imagery. Even in one of his starkly modern poems, “Florida in January”, Logan cannot help but include a comparison of restless strangers visiting the state to the Roman poet Ovid roaming the Black Sea. Throughout the poetry collection’s first four sections, subtle references to historical moments and figures serve as foils to the contemporary world Logan observes around him. However, history and Logan’s perception of its passage become all-encompassing themes in the poetry collection’s fifth and final grouping, aptly titled “The Fall of Byzantium”. Twelve poems compose this group, each self-contained and oriented around a specific location of historical significance to the city once known as Byzantium (renamed Constantinople in 330 CE and now known as Istanbul).
The relevance of Byzantium to classical studies cannot be understated. Byzantium, a reference to both the city itself and to the Byzantine Empire, adapted many Greco-Roman traditions and characteristics, cementing it as somewhat of a successor empire to Rome. The city acted as a cultural center for the empire until its capture in 1453 CE by Sultan Mehmed II and the Ottoman Turks. While the exact date of the empire’s decline is contested by historians, the capture of the city is widely seen as the end of Byzantium.
Logan himself seems to be a bit of a contemporary Romanticist—he is a great admirer of the classics and the emotions they arouse, championing Romantic figures like Milton and even Captain Ahab from Moby Dick. As a testament to his love for Romanticism, Logan dedicates one section, called “Milton’s Tongue”, of Night Battle to contemporary poems on Miltonian locations and themes. But Captain Ahab and Moby Dick also play a central role in “The Fall of Byzantium”. Logan begins the section with an epigraph from Moby Dick:
The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self.
Logan points to the subjectivity of history and to how his own perceptions of the physical world reflect “his own mysterious self”—rather than offering objective, physical descriptions, Logan assigns metaphors and figurative language to the churches, hotels, and walls within Byzantium. This perspective goes both ways: we see history through his eyes, just as his reflections reveal a man enamored by the cruel past. It is then unsurprising that there are few moments of plain description or explication within these poems. Instead, the places Logan writes his poems around are conduits for his own perspective. For instance, while looking out the window from within the Pera Palas hotel, Logan sighs, “each view not a lie, but the fossil of a lie,” speaking directly to his profound sense of loss at being unable to experience the past as it was. Because this past isn’t Logan’s reality, he can only construct his own imaginings—or as he phrases it, his “lies”—of the city as it was experienced in 1453 CE.
Along with offering his own perspective on Byzantium, Logan uses the geographical concreteness of his poems to immerse the reader in locations distant both physically and temporally. The poems’ sense of place makes it seem as if the reader is travelling alongside Logan as a witness to his somber observations on the nature of history. The arrangement of poems almost feels like a travel itinerary of sorts, as the first poem begins with a visit to the historical “grand-no-more” hotel Pera Palas—a fitting first stop for weary travelers. Besides the spatiality of the poems, Logan uses internal elements to create an intimate connection between the reader and the imagined space they occupy in Byzantium. Logan places the reader in the midst of the poem’s action through the inclusion of a second-person subject: “In the Spice Bazar / men swarmed around us” (“Spice Bazaar”) and “You thought you heard the jazzy clamor of a horn” (“Galata Tower”). In the midst of action, it is easy to see how Logan gets swept away by the history of the places he visits, and how he pulls the reader in with him.
Logan further breathes life into historical structures through an emphasis on physical changes over time. For instance, in the poem “Haghia Sophia”, Logan describes the church-turned-mosque, the center of Byzantine life and culture, through a variety of personifying language, with lines like: “even the cold stone had ambitions for itself” and the scintillating “cool mosaics flayed from the walls like skin.” Logan reinforces the church, marked by “stray chisel marks, cold plots of betrayal, [and] fires pitched against the living wall,” as a symbol for constantly changing history. Once again, physicality becomes entwined with notions of history. Changes in the composition of these structures reflect a wider historical moment, such as a changing of regime, as in “Great Palace”, or the rising of a new religion with “Haghia Sophia”.
Logan offsets revenant depictions of ancient structures with declaratory sentiments on the nature of history. His melancholic lens produces the image of an unflinching past where “what survives is not love but order / the remnants of a past refused by the past” (“Basilica Cistern”). Historical and religious figures also do not escape Logan’s gaze. Much like Percy Byssche Shelley’s infamous “Ozymandias”, Logan’s conception of time leaves “the last kings of Sidon” (“Alexander Sarcophagus”) locked in a stone tomb to be eaten away until they are nothing. Using the image of sand as time, Logan writes “the Christian God took his powers from the sand / and left His powers to sand again” (“Haghia Sophia”) to explain the religious transformations undergone by Haghia Sophia as the Ottomans gained control of it. Time and history, its byproduct, leave nothing untouched in their ceaseless progression ahead (1).
Though Byzantium is no longer, Logan manages to muster much of its allure and power with a few lines of poetry. Enchanting lines fixated on changing physical appearances piece together a material account of Logan’s journey through the city and the various historical sites he has visited. Yet, there is a tangible spiritual aspect to these pieces, as if one should only read them in whispers. As Logan would likely attest to, time will continue moving, but “Fall of Byzantium” will surely remind its audience of the history it leaves behind.
(1) Other lines on this subject that caught my attention: “Past has no need for forgiveness and the future no need to pardon” (“Alexander Sarcophagus”); “We came to see the past, but the past was blind” (“Basilica Cistern”); “No one survives the pastness of the past” (Aqueduct of Valens)