Sailing to Byzantium

"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.