Summary
"Sailing to Byzantium", by William Butler Yeats, is a poem first published in the collection October Blast (1927) and then republished in the collection The Tower (1928); Yeats dedicated "Sailing to Byzantium" to the artist Norah McGuinness. "Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem in four stanzas of ottava rima, each composed of eight lines of iambic pentameter to narrate a journey to the city of Byzantium (Constantinople). In the poem, Yeats muses about the convergence of immortality, art, and the human spirit and describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of eternal life and conception of paradise.
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Historical Background
Yeats wrote "Sailing to Byzantium" in 1926, when he was in his early sixties, and first published it in the collection October Blast (1927) before it appeared as the opening poem of The Tower (1928). The poem reflects his preoccupation with old age, bodily decay, and the desire for an art that outlasts the flesh. Byzantium (Constantinople), for Yeats, symbolized a lost civilization he imagined as having achieved a perfect fusion of religious, aesthetic, and practical life, an ideal explored in his prose work A Vision. The poem's elderly speaker turns away from the fecund, sensual world of the living toward the eternal, unageing world of Byzantine art. It draws on Yeats's lifelong fascination with Byzantine mosaics and craftsmanship, particularly the golden birds and enameled ornaments he associated with the Byzantine court. Written in ottava rima, a stanza form associated with epic and elevated meditation, the poem stands among Yeats's major late works exploring the tension between nature and artifice, youth and age, the transient and the eternal.
The Story
The poem unfolds in four stanzas of argument rather than narrative action. In the first stanza, the speaker declares that the country he has left behind is "no country for old men": a world of the young in one another's arms, birds, fish, and flesh, all caught in the cycle of birth, death, and "sensual music," which neglects works of intellect. In the second stanza, the aging speaker describes an old man as a "tattered coat upon a stick" unless his soul claps its hands and sings; he has therefore sailed the seas to the holy city of Byzantium. In the third stanza he calls upon the sages standing in Byzantium's golden mosaic, asking them to be the "singing-masters" of his soul, to consume his heart away and gather him "into the artifice of eternity," since his heart is sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal body. In the final stanza, the speaker declares that once out of nature he will never again take his bodily form from a natural thing, but will instead become a golden mechanical bird set upon a golden bough, singing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past, passing, or to come.
Themes
- Art versus nature
- Old age and bodily decay
- The desire for immortality through art
- Transience versus the eternal
- The soul's transcendence of the flesh
- Civilization and artifice as refuge
- The generative, sensual world of the young
Literary Devices
- Ottava rima — eight-line iambic pentameter stanzas rhyming abababcc, giving the poem a measured, meditative gravity
- Symbolism — Byzantium, the golden bird, and the mosaic sages function as symbols rather than literal settings
- Extended metaphor — the voyage to Byzantium figures the soul's passage from mortal life to eternal art
- Apostrophe — the speaker directly addresses the sages in stanza three, invoking them as guides
- Imagery — vivid sensory imagery of the natural world (salmon-falls, mackerel-crowded seas) contrasts with the artificial gold of Byzantium
- Paradox — the speaker seeks to escape nature by becoming an artificial, unnatural bird
- Enjambment — lines run over stanza breaks and clauses to build a searching, argumentative momentum
Symbolism
- Byzantium — an imagined ideal civilization uniting art, spirit, and craft, opposed to the transient natural world
- The golden bird — the artifice of eternal, changeless art as opposed to the dying animal body
- The mosaic sages in the holy fire — spiritual and artistic wisdom the aging speaker seeks to join
- The "dying animal" heart — the mortal, desiring body the speaker wishes to be freed from
- The salmon-falls and mackerel-crowded seas — the fertile, cyclical natural world of youth and generation
Critical Interpretation
Sailing to Byzantium has been read as a central statement of Yeats's late poetic philosophy, closely tied to the mystical system he set out in A Vision, where Byzantium represents a historical moment of ideal unity between art, religion, and life. Critics have long debated whether the poem endorses the speaker's desire to escape the body for artifice, or dramatizes and questions that desire, noting the strangeness and even horror of becoming a mechanical bird. Formalist critics admire its disciplined ottava rima and the tension it sustains between sensuous natural imagery and the cold perfection of art. The poem is frequently discussed alongside "Byzantium" (from The Winding Stair, 1933), its companion piece, with scholars tracing how the later poem complicates or extends the first. It is also read within modernist debates on the relationship between art and mortality, and as part of Yeats's broader engagement with symbolism and the occult.
Quotations
That is no country for old men.
The poem's famous opening, contrasting the world of youthful sensuality with the aging speaker's exclusion from it
An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing
The speaker's meditation on the diminishment of old age and the compensating power of the soul
Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is
Address to the sages, asking to be purged of mortal desire and gathered into eternity
Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing
The speaker's declaration of his wish to become an artificial, eternal form
Influence
Sailing to Byzantium is one of the most widely anthologized and studied poems of modernist English verse, frequently paired with its companion poem "Byzantium." Its opening line has become proverbial shorthand for the exclusion of age from a world of youth, and the poem is a touchstone for discussions of the relationship between art and mortality in twentieth-century poetry. It has influenced later poets' treatment of aging, artifice, and transcendence, and remains a staple text in university and competitive-examination syllabi on modern British and Irish poetry.
Related Works
- Byzantium by W. B. Yeats
- The Tower by W. B. Yeats
- A Vision by W. B. Yeats
- Among School Children by W. B. Yeats
- Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Curator's Notes
- 1The poem first appeared in the pamphlet October Blast (1927) before becoming the opening poem of The Tower (1928).
- 2Yeats dedicated the poem to the Irish artist Norah McGuinness.
- 3The poem is written in ottava rima, an Italian stanza form historically used for epic and heroic verse.
- 4Yeats returned to Byzantium as a subject in a later poem simply titled "Byzantium" (1933), often read as a companion or sequel.
- 5The image of the golden mechanical bird is thought to draw on Yeats's readings about Byzantine imperial court automata.
For the Exam
UGC NET commonly tests the poem's ottava rima form, its place in The Tower (1928), the symbolic contrast between the natural/sensual world and Byzantium as an emblem of art and eternity, the meaning of key images (the golden bird, the dying animal, the mosaic sages), and its relationship to Yeats's prose work A Vision and the companion poem "Byzantium." Questions may also ask students to identify the opening line or attribute quoted lines to their stanza.