Sailing to Byzantium Summery by William Butler Yeats

INTRODUCTION

Sailing to Byzantium is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928
collection The Tower. It comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight
ten-syllable lines. It uses a journey to Constantinople (Byzantium as a metaphor for a
spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and
the human spirit may converge. Through the use of various poetic techniques, Yeats's
Sailing to Byzantium describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own
vision of eternal life as well as his conception of paradise. Written in 1926 (when Yeats
was 60 or 61), Sailing to Byzantium is Yeats's definitive statement about the agony of
old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even
when the heart is "fastened to a dying animal" (the body). Yeats's solution is to leave
the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city's famous
gold mosaics could become the "singing-masters" of his soul. He hopes the sages will
appear in fire and take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where,
like a great work of art, he could exist in "the artifice of eternity." In the final stanza of
the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the
form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree,
singing of the past ("what is past"), the present (that which is "passing"), and the future
(that which is "to come").

ANNOTATIONS

Perne in a gyre: Perne could refer to a pern, another name for a honeybuzzard. This
would make considerable, thematic sense. Yeats repeats themes, words and ideas
throughout the poem, especially as regards birds and song. Also, consider the opening
lines to Yeats' poem "The Second Coming":
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things
fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The imagery of the falcon in the gyre isn't far removed from the imagery of a pern in a
gyre. Could Yeats have misspelled pern (spelling it perne)? If one thinks of the pern as
a bird of prey, then Yeats' might be comparing the sages to birds of prey. He is inviting
them to descend in an ever-more focused, fiery gyre until they find and consume his
heart, the heart of a dying animal.

And fastened to a dying animal : Would have been censured by readers and critiques
prior to the 20th century. Few poets would have dared end an lambic Pentameter line
with a pyrrhic foot. It would have been considered inept and amateurish. In all of
Milton's Paradise (several thousand lines) there is not a single example (though some
"scholars" have failed to take into account the changing pronunciation of words). As in
the gold mosaic of a wall: This makes the line lambic Tatremater rather than lambic
Pentameter (four feet instead of five) and makes the final foot anapestic. This would
make the line a variant line and is well within Yeats' practice, but since mosaic can be
pronounced as a three syllable word 'I've opted to scan it as an Iambic Pentameter line
(given that Yeats has been fairly conservative in his other lines).

SUMMARY AND COMMENT

The speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is "no country for old
men": it is full of youth and life, with the young lying in one another's arms, birds
singing in the trees, and fish swimming in the waters. There, "all summer long" the
world rings with the "sensual music" that makes the young neglect the old, whom the
speaker describes as "Monuments of unageing intellect."
An old man, the speaker says, is a "paltry thing," merely a tattered coat upon a stick,
unless his soul çan clap its hands and sing; and the only way for the soul to learn how
to sing is to study "monuments of its own magnificence". Therefore, the speaker has
"sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium". The speaker addresses the
sages "standing in God's holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall", and asks them to
be his soul's "singing-masters". He hopes they will consume his heart away, for his
heart "knows not what it is"- it is "sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal",
and the speaker wishes to be gathered "Into the artifice of eternity".

The speaker says that once he has been taken out of the natural world, he will no
longer take his "bodily form" from any "natural thing", but rather will fashion himself as
a singing bird made of hammered gold, such as Grecian goldsmiths make "To keep a
drowsy. Emperor awake", or set upon a tree of gold "to sing / To lords and ladies of
Byzantium / Or what is past, or passing, or to come". Sailing to Byzantium is one of
Yeats's most inspired works, and one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century.
Written in 1926 and included in Yeats's greatest single collection, 1928's The Tower,
Sailing to Byzantium is Yeats's definitive statement about the agony of old age and the
imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart
is "fastened to a dying animal" (the body). Yeats's solution is to leave the country of the
young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city's famous gold mosaics
(completed mainly during the sixth and seventh centuries) could become the
"singingmasters" of his soul. He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him away
from his body into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could
exist in "the artifice of eternity". In the astonishing final stanza of the poem, he
declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a
natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of
the past ("what is past"), the present (that which is "passing"), and the future (that
which is "to come").

A fascination with the artificial as superior to the natural is one of Yeats's most
prevalent themes. In a much earlier poem, 1899's "The Lover Tells of the Rose in His
Heart", the speaker expresses a longing to re-make the world "in a casket of gold" and
thereby eliminate its ugliness and imperfection. Later, in 1914's "The Dolls", the
speaker writes of a group of dolls on a shelf, disgusted by the sight of a human baby.
In each case, the artificial (the golden casket, the beautiful doll, the golden bird) is seen
as perfect and unchanging, while the natural (the world, the human baby, the speaker's
body) is prone to ugliness and decay. What is more, the speaker sees deep spiritual
truth (rather than simply aesthetic escape) in his assumption of artificiality; he wishes
his soul to learn to sing, and transforming into a golden bird is the way to make it
capable of doing so. Sailing to Byzantium is an endlessly interpretable poem, and
suggests endlessly fascinating comparisons with other important poems-poems of
travel, poems of age, poems of nature, poems featuring birds as symbols. (One of the
most interesting is surely Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale", to which this poem is in many
ways a rebuttal: Keats writes of his nightingale, "Thou wast not born for death,
immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down"; Yeats, in the first stanza of
Sailing to Byzantium, refers to birds in the trees" as "those dying generations".) It is
important to note that the poem is not autobiographical; Yeats did not travel to
Byzantium (which was renamed Constantinople in the fourth century A. D., and later
renamed Istanbul), but he did argue that, in the sixth century, it offered the ideal
environment for the artist. The poem is about an imaginative journey, not an actual
one.

*********B.D************

Sailing to Byzantium Questions and Answers

BROAD QUESTIONS.

1. Critically analyse the poem Sailing to Byzantium.

This poem was written by Yeats in 1926, marking a point in his maturity, it was part of
collection called Tower, when Yeats stayed at the home of Lady Gregory in Coole Park
near Gort in Co. Galway. The title of the poem refers to the ancient city of Byzantium,
capital of the Byzantine ruled by the Turkish Sultan, the city is now called Istanbul.

Stanza I: In the opening line of the poem Yeats states: "That is no country for old men".
A reference, both to ancient Byzantium and post 1922 Free State Ireland. The mention
of old men provides our first example of Yeats' preoccupation with old age. The stanza
continues by painting a picture of teaming life, the sensuous world of youth, vitality,

reproduction, decay and death. The opening statements are quickly checked by the
phrase- "Those dying generations", recognition by Yeats of the transience of life. He
suggests that despite their apparent happiness, each is condemned to death, their
mortality is inescapable : "Whatever is begotten born and dies". This contrasts the
sensual world with the world of art, best represented by the magnificence of
Byzantium: "I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded
history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one". In 1912 he had visited the city
of Ravenna, in northern Italy and had seen there some examples of early Byzantium
art. He recognized that many generations of people had witnessed the pictures, but
that the pictures themselves had maintained their vitality and freshness, they it
seemed were ageless, the figures portrayed in them also achieved a permanence that
was not possible in reality. The predicament facing Yeats is what he perceives to be a
growing dichotomy between his ageing body and his still youthful mind or intellect. He
offers, in the opening stanza, the contrast between those who concentrate on the
sensual world and those who are preoccupied with the permanent world of art.

: Stanza II Yeats discusses an old man as something of little consequence: "An aged
man is but a paltry thing". He uses the analogy with a scarecrow, to represent the
lifelessness of someone old. It is as if the marrow has been sucked from the bones,
the blood and flesh of the living have been removed, leaving behind a lifeless shell.
This for Yeats is the inevitability of old age, unless "Soul clap its hands and sing".
Unless one concentrates on the intellect of soul and by doing so seek to escape from
the constraints of the human body. Consequently he has resolved to attempt such a
journey, a metaphorical voyage : "I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of
Byzantium". Which is for him the symbol of artistic magnificence and permanence?

Stanza III: He begins by referring to a particular painting he saw in a Ravenna church,

the painting depicted martyrs being burned for their faith. Yeats interpretation
suggests that these martyrs were sages and that the flames represent the Holy Spirit,
in other words that the moment of their deaths, was equivalent to moving from
the mortal life to the immortal life and achieving a permanence through both the life of
the soul and the Byzantine painting. The phrase “perne in a gyre" refers to a spinning
wheel such as those Yeats would have seen during his youth in Sligo. Yeats is referring
to the movement of thread through bobbin and spool; a movement that is so fast that
it is imperceptible to the naked eye. The point that Yeats is highlighting is that each
individual strand of thread is submerged by speed into one continuous piece, similarly
each successive human life is a mirror image of a previous one, but that taken together
there is a continuation, permanence. The figures in the Byzantine mosaic have been
viewed by successive generations in that Ravenna church, but have not themselves
succumbed to the ravishes of time. Yeats now calls on these figures, to be his guides
on his voyage to Byzantium, to help him break free from his decrepit body which he
now sees as a "dying animal". The poet wants to be subsumed into the world of
Byzantine art, to be like the figures in the gold mosaic. Yeats sees gold as representing
an untarnished brilliance and permanence that best reflects his opinion of art.

Stanza VI: In the final stanza he begins by declaring that in this world of art, he would
not take on the form of any natural thing, which like the images of the opening stanza,
would be susceptible to the ravages of time, decay and death. Instead he would take
the form of a golden bird - an image based on golden birds that adorned trees in the
palace of the Byzantine emperor. Yeats has finally broken with the sensual mortal
world, he has rejected life as we know it, in favor of an intellectual permanence
produced by a work of art. However he has not fully succeeded, the use of the word
drowsy, rekindles the sensuous overtones of the poem, suggesting that the poet's
intellect is limited by his human condition, that in seeking a perfect existence his
intellect is unable to avoid that which appeals to his senses. This becomes more
obvious in the final lines of the poem. Line 30 is the voice of the golden bird that Yeats
highlights again, contradicting his purpose in the poem. It is not the beauty of the
hammered gold that Yeats now refers to, but the beauty of the bird's voice which
cannot come from a golden bird in a painting. The final line of the poem :

"Of what is past passing or to come" reflects the line from the opening stanza :
"Whatever is begotten, born and dies". In an effort to represent permanence and
timelessness, and in achieving a resolution to his quest, the poet, paradoxically
completes the poem by dividing time into past, present and future, suggesting that his
intellect remains within the bounds of his human condition. Although the poem is
ostensibly about Yeats' attempts to achieve an artist's permanence, through :
"Monuments of un-ageing intellect." represented by Byzantine art. Some critics
suggest that Yeats is far more concerned with his loss of sexual potency, his
references in the opening stanza to "the young in one another's arms etc." are perhaps
indicating a jealousy of the young and perhaps his concentration is as a direct result of
his recognition of his physical failings. The image chosen by Yeats to represent the
ideal artist states that the golden bird was only introduced to the poem in the final
drafts. Earlier drafts of the poem show Yeats wishing to take on the form of Phideas-a
statue in Byzantium which represented the perfect like Adonis. This shows that at least
during the writing of the poem, Yeats was wishing for physical perfection. This theme
is also continued in "Among School Children", where Yeats refers to "Golden-thighed
Pythagoras", and refers to the virility of Pythagoras. Yeats juxtaposes contrasting
images of the sensuous world and the world of art, thereby creating a tension and
conflict which he hopes to resolve by the end of the poem. In the opening stanza, the
images of the sensuous world are depicted by the phrases in a staccato-like rhythm
e.g.: "The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh or fowl, commend all
summer long whatever is begotten, born and dies." In contrast the image which he
associates with artistic permanence : "Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of un-ageing intellect." is written in a flowing style, perhaps a sense of
timelessness and permanence in contrast to the transience of the previous image.
There is also a noticeable contrast in the syllabic used by Yeats in the
words.representing the sensual and the intellectual. It is noticeable that many of the
words associated with mortal life are monosyllabic or at most are composed of two
syllables e.g. (a) "fish, flesh, fowl." And (b) "An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered
coat upon a stick".

By contrast many of the words used to reflect the permanence of the intellect are
polysyllabic e.g. (a) "Monuments of un-ageing intellect." (b) "Of hammered gold and
gold enameling". The poem sets out to display the superiority of the world of art, to
show that permanence can be achieved through art as in Byzantium and that human
life by contrast is transient. Yeats uses symbolism throughout the poem to represent
this contrast.

Symbolism: The use of symbolism is very important throughout the poem. The title of
the poem Sailing to Byzantium contains two important symbols: (a) Sailing which
depicts a metaphorical journey and gives substance and a physical aspect to what
Yeats is trying to achieve. (b) Byzantium symbolizes a world of artistic magnificence
and permanence, conjuring up in the mind of the reader, a rich and inclusive culture
such as that associated with the Byzantium empire. The images of birds, fish and
young lovers used by Yeats in the first stanza symbolizes transience and mortality.
Yeats highlights this aspect of the world he lives in, so that the world which he seeks
i.e. Byzantium, becomes more clearly focused. In the second stanza Yeats uses the
symbol of a scarecrow to represent the decrepitude of old age. The scarecrow is a
repulsive lifeless image symbolizing everything that Yeats wants to reject in his mortal
existence. The symbol of music ´ and sóng runs through the poem providing a unified
motif between the worlds of intellect and sensual worlds. In the opening stanza the
song is that of the birds in the trees, a sensual though transient song. In the second
stanza he projects an image of "a singing school" a suggestion that the joy
experienced in this artistic paradise is more comparable than the joy of song. This idea
is again repeated in stanza three. In the final stanza the song of the golden bird which
entertains the lords and ladies of Byzantium represents the intellectual joy to be
experienced. by Yeats. The golden bird of the final stanza is a chosen image of the
permanent form Yeats wishes to take, in essence it represents durability which one
associates with the untarnished quality of gold, by virtue of it's physical permanence
there is the understood contribution of its song, thereby providing what Yeats hopes
will be the representation of the artistic existence he yearns for.
2. Critically analyse the plot and the major theme of the
poem.

Sailing to Byzantium, a lyric poem, has neither conventional characters nor plot. The
poem consists of four open-form stanzas and features a speaker who may be thought
of, as Richard Ellmann suggests, as "a symbol of Yeats and of the artist and of man".
The action of the poem concerns the problem of immersing oneself in life and at the
same time striving for permanence. The opening stanza describes a state of youth, a
sensuous, sometimes violent, life with emphasis on productivity and regeneration
("That is no country for old men"), and then contrasts this sensuality with the
intellectual and the transitory with the permanent : "Caught in that sensual music all
neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect".

Acknowledging both his mortality and desire for transcendence, the speaker prepares
his soul for the body's death by "studying / Monuments of its own magnificence" and
"sail[s] the seas and come /To the holy city of Byzantium." In Byzantium, the speaker
hopes to fuse the "sensual music" with the "monuments," that is, the passing pleasures
with transcendent art. In 1931, Yeats wrote that he chose to "symbolize the search for
the spiritual life by a journey to that city" because "Byzantium was the centre of
European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy". In Byzantium, the
speaker encounters a world of timeless art and spirituality, represented by sages and
"God's holy fire" with flames and smoke twisting like a "perne in a gyre," an allusion to
Yeats's cyclical theory of history and transcendence. The speaker wishes to lose his
heart, "sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal," and have his soul gathered
"into the artifice of eternity" so that "Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily
form from any natural thing". In the last stanza, the speaker imagines himself
transformed into a work of art that transcends the passing of time, a Byzantine work of
art, a golden bird that is animate in that it sings to the Emperor, but inanimate as a
work of art that will survive generations. The source of several major themes in Sailing
to Byzantium can be found in Yeats's 1925 work, A Vision (1925), in which he develops
his cyclical theory of life, based in part on Yeats's

understanding of the Hegelian dialectic and his reading of Blake's prophetic poetry. In
Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats used the concept of the spiraling gyre to suggest that
opposite concepts-such as youth and age, body and soul, nature and art, transient and
eternal-are in fact mutually dependent upon each other. Yoked together by the gyre and
the poem itself, the mutually interpenetrating opposites-thesis and antithesis-resolve
in such a way as to produce a synthesis that contains a larger truth. In Sailing to
Byzantium, the golden bird contains elements of transitory nature-namely, its music
with the transcendent qualities of timeless art.

The tension between art and life is an essential dichotomy in Yeats's poetry. Yeats
envisioned the artist as a kind of alchemist, whose transformative art obscures the
distinction between "the dancer and the dance," as he wrote in the poem, "Among
School Children." For Yeats, only through imagination could the raw materials of life be
transformed into something enduring. Thus Sailing to Byzantium has at least two
symbolic readings, both mutually interdependent upon the other. The poem is both
about the journey taken by the speaker's soul around the time of death and the process
by which, through his art, the artist transcends his own mortality.

An important symbol in Sailing to Byzantium is the ancient city of Byzantium, which in

the fifth and sixth centuries was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and the
center of art and architecture. Byzantine art did not attempt to represent human forms,
and so, for Yeats, Byzantium symbolized a way of life in which art is celebrated as
artifice. Furthermore, Byzantium represents what Yeats, in A Vision, calls "Unity of
Being," in which "religious, aesthetic and practical life were one" and art represented
"the vision of a whole people."

3. How is the fear of ageing expressed in the poem?

Although there are several allusions to it made by several scholars within the vast
library of biographical works regarding William Butler Yeats, the poet's intense fear and
disdain of aging and death can be discerned with even the most cursory reading of his
works.

Yeats' poems reflect an intense dread of the aging process with its decay and
impending threat of death on both a physical and spiritual level through the use of
imagery and reflection. For W.B. Yeats, there is little that is honorable about becoming
an old man, perhaps simply because there is still so much left to do. Despite having
lived a life that might appear to the outsider as quite fulfilling, William Butler Yeats
remained somewhat hollow and unsatisfied with the great deal of personal and artistic
progress he made throughout his long life. There are several themes that are common
throughout the poems of William Butler Yeats. Many of poems by W.B. Yeats reflect an
unrelenting obsession with the past-both the distant past and that of his personal life-
and these fixations are symbolic of his fear of growing old or aging and a persistent
fear of death. There were many things W. B. Yeats wanted to accomplish, one of which
was gaining the hand of his long-time love Maud Gonne. Images of her, both as she
appeared to him in his memory and as expressed by allusions àre frequent throughout
Yeats' poetry as are his numerous references to the grim process of aging and
preparing for death. For Yeats, death or even aging alone was not the romantic end or
dramatic solution-it was an organic process that caused a man to become hollow and
scarecrow-like. Along with this thesis statement expressed here on the similarities in
themes in the poems by W.B. Yeats and their fixation on death and aging, it should also
be noted that many of the poems by Yeats induce an image of an aged man as such a
scarecrow or as a man in tatters with little left of any substance. Such a man is only
able to stagnate in one position and can only look backward since moving forward is
no longer a possibility. Although this is a rather bleak image, it is highly representative
of the many struggles W.B. Yeats endured in as a young man, a frustrated suitor, a
political pioneer, and finally, an aged poet-a sage. Although traces of these themes are
recurrent in several poems by William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, "Among
Schoolchildren," and "The Circus Animal's Desertion" portray these complex themes
most completely.
One of the most stunning poems reflecting implicit fear of aging in poems by William
Butler Yeats occurs throughout Sailing to Byzantium. This poem was written in 1926
as W.B. Yeats was growing older and beginning to realize the meaning and
consequences of old age. Sailing to Byzantium reflects the speaker's desire to return
to an older age far from the youthful excesses and their inability to recognize age and
wisdom. One of the important quotes from Sailing to Byzantium is at the beginning
and says, "that is no country for old men. The young / in one another's arms, birds in
the trees-those dying generations" which discusses the reason for the speaker's
journey. He no longer feels he has a place among the youthful exuberance and seeks
something more fulfilling and ancient. Although the young represented in the poem by
William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium are "those dying generations" they are
nonetheless too engaged with their trivialities to understand the pursuits of an old man
who feels he is condemned to live in an aging body, or "fastened to a dying animal"
while his soul yearns to be free. To the speaker of Sailing to Byzantium by W.B. Yeats
and also to the poet himself, aging is a foul degrading process and the only things that
were sustainable and true are the relics of gold that serve as testaments to an older
age such as that in Sailing to Byzantium. All that is organic or living is prone to death
and decay, even the young people at the beginning who are "dying generations" and
especially men that are already advanced in age. It is worth noting in this poem
analysis of Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats that the speaker comments
upon both the appearance and presumably the soul of an aging or old man when he
begins the second stanza with the statement, "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A
tattered coat upon a stick, unless / his soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing /
For every tatter in its mortal dress." This description of an aged man is hollow and
devoid of personality. The image that arises in the reader's mind is one of a scarecrow-
something made from flimsy material without genuine substance and prone to the
elements.

Furthermore, and also important in this analysis of Sailing to Byzantium by William

Butler Yeats, the imagery of this scarecrow figure suddenly clapping to prove its vitality
becomes grotesque and nearly absurd, which demonstrates that this is something rare
or perhaps even impossible. While the remainder of the poem Sailing to Byzantium by
W. B. Yeats discusses a way for this tattered heap of sticks and old clothing to live on,
this series of imagery tactics on the part of Yeats to express symbols of aging versus
youth are difficult to escape or forget about and it becomes clear that this is a prime
example of the author's personal fear of aging-of turning to dust or to mere rags on a
stick-despite the somewhat epic ending featuring a man living on through wisdom,
relics, and memory. To a mystic such as W. B. Yeats, the concept of the aging soul
outlasting the "dying animal" of the body is not uncharacteristic and can be witnessed
in several of his later poems as well.

SHORT QUESTIONS

1. What is the general meaning of Sailing to Byzantium by the poet W. B. Yeats.?

Sailing to Byzantium is akin to many other travel poems, it uses symbols of course : i.e.
you could compare Keats and his poem "Ode to a Nightingale" to ask is this the
opposite of Yeats? Both poems use birds as symbols. The journey of course was never
taken by Yeats, Byzantium would be what we know as Constantinople today or Istanbul
as it has been renamed. What Yeats is trying to argue is that Byzantium in the
centuries past would have been a perfect environment for the budding artist. You have
to identify the admiration he holds for the old wise men and masters of art etc. This
poem comes from a collection called The Tower written in 1926. It is really the onset
and creeping of old age that he feels can be renewed only in the lively, artistic city of
Byzantium. Yeats sees this as a kind of past present and future existence but not in the
time reality that we understand. The journey itself is imagined but one but one could
argue that Yeats portrays it as an actual journey to enrich the soul of an old man. This
is the only book at the moment that I would recommend: The most superb explanation
and body of work that sets out to uncover and discuss Greek themes in the work of
Yeats can be understood by reading Professor Brian Arkins book Builders of my Soul
(1991).

2. Critically analyse Sailing to Byzantium as a transcendental journey poem.

Sailing Much like Keats's Nightingale Ode, W. B. Yeats's poem to Byzantium is also a
transcendental journey poem. Yeats's own mystical orientation that always creates in
him a double-bind involving Irishness and Greek antiquity is operative here, once again.
The journey from Ireland to Byzantium is a journey of perfection, from sensualist
pleasure of unthinking youth to the sublime meditation of intellectual maturity. There is
almost a cynical tone of renunciation of the 'bodily form' of a mere pleasure-principle in
the first stanza. The youthfully arrogant Ireland disowns the paltry old man, reducing
him to nothing but a collection of fragile bones, tending towards mortality.

On the other hand, Byzantium signifies for Yeats a holy Paradisal place, transcendence
from the Fallen state as it were, a land of beauty and joy, culled through rigorous study
and the flight of reason coupled with imagination. It is like womb of human culture, art
and architecture, a land of the mystical, the "Promised Land" where the gyres of history
start to move again as opposed to a temporal stand-still as in the Irish world. On the
verge of death, the old poet finds in Byzantium, the signifying epiphany of life as well
as a spiritual liberation. But as in Keats's poem, there is a tinge of irony in the
realization that the golden bough will only have a divine song-bird, which is made up of
gold and it is only an "artifice of eternity." The ironic Keatsean choice is between
natural and dynamic mortality and artificial and stagnant immortality.

3. How does the poem reflect the search for the meaning in life?

W. B. Yeats spent a lot of his life searching for meaning in life. This is reflected in many
of his poems especially Sailing to Byzantium. In this poem the poet is saying that in
order to be happy in old age we should abandon the pleasures of the world and turn to
the spiritual and eternal instead. This is achieved through a metaphorical journey the
poet takes us on to the city of Byzantium. Byzantium was in the 5th and 6th centuries
the artistic and cultural centre of art and architecture in Europe. In this poem it calls up
enduring images of extreme beauty
such as golden mosaics and carved birds that pleasure an Emperor. It is also symbolic
of a heavenly place. In the poem we are asked to abandon the pleasures of the world
for eternal things. We are told that an old man is but a scarecrow unless his soul takes
over. When that happens he is at the shores of Byzantium. The poet prays that after he
has been cleansed by the 'holy fire' (line 16) that he will be gathered into "the artifices
of eternity" (line 24). When this happens to him he will be just as timeless as the
golden monuments of Byzantium.

VERY SHORT QUESTIONS

1. Who is the poet in the poem?

The Poet is "an aged man" who comes to the realization that youth and sensual life are
no longer an option for him, and he commences on a spiritual journey to the ideal
world of Byzantium.

2. Why does the poet decide to go to Byzantium?

The poet therefore decides to go the Byzantium which is a traditional place of art and
engage himself there with the study of the treasures.

3. Why does the poet call the place 'holy'?

The poet also called Byzantium 'holy' for it is the center of spiritual and intellectual
activity and not a place suitable for physical and sensuous pleasures of life.

4. Who comes down from heaven when the poet reaches the place?
As soon as the poet arrives in the Byzantium he prays to God's saints to come down
from heaven and teach him to appreciate art; he request them to help his being
absorbed into the artifice of eternity that engaged in the pursuit of the spiritual.

5. What is the rhyming of the poem?

Sailing to Byzantium is quite a short poem consisting of four stanzas, rhyming

abababcc, all in roughly iambic pentameter. In the first stanza, the poet describes, the
natural world, where the young of all species- birds, fishes, and people are busy loving,
reproducing and commending the flesh,

6. What does the poet celebrate as an old man?

As an old man, the poet at once celebrates the fertility and joyful images of teeming
fish, birds and people but despairs of their temporal ignorance.

7. What is the predicament in the second stanza?

In the second stanza Yeats describes the predicament of the old man more closely 'An
aged man' is no more than a scarecrow, a tattered coat upon a stick' without much
physical vigor.

8. Why the old man must seek to go to Byzantium?

Hence the old must seek Byzantium; that is, the country of the old; it is reached by
sailing the seas, by breaking utterly with the country of the young; all passion must be
left behind; the soul must be free to study the emblems of unchanging things.

9. To whom does the poet appeal in the third stanza of the poem?

In the third stanza Yeats now appeals to the sages who stand in God's holy fire and
who have thus been purged of the last remnants of sensuality. These sages look like
the figure represented in the gold mosaic of a wall.

10. What does the poet want them to do?

The poet wants them to come out of the holy fire and to descend upon him with a
hawk- like movement. He wants them to become the "singing masters of his soul" and
to purify his heart. In other words he wants them to teach him to listen to spiritual
music, as distinguished from the sensual music.

11. What will happen to the poet after getting rid of all these?

The poet after getting rid of all sensual desires would like to be transformed into some
object of art having an eternal value.

12. What does the third stanza represent?

The third stanza presents the speaker standing before a golden mosaic, pleading the
Byzantine sages and "God's holy fire" to illuminate his soul. He realizes that his heart is
trapped inside a fleshy creature that will soon die: the poet wants to leave this world
and enter the world of timeless art through his song-poetry.

13. What does the poet reject in the fourth stanza?

In the fourth stanza Yeats has renounced his earthly body, he would not like to re-born
in the same or in any other earthly shape. He will reject all physical incarnations,
because all living beings are subject to mortality and death. He would like to become
something eternal and imperishable.

14. What shape he would like to take?

He would take the shape of the golden bird, the kind of bird which Grecian goldsmiths
are believed to have designed for the pleasure of an emperor. As a golden bird, a work
of art. he would be beyond decay or death and would therefore be unlike the "dying
generations” of real birds.

15. What will the poet do as a golden bird?

As a golden bird, he will be placed on a golden bough, and he will appear to be singing
songs of all times to an audience of the lords and ladies of Byzantium. His song, when
he becomes a golden bird, will be that of spiritual ecstasy and he will be surrounded,
not by the young lovers and other animal creatures of the sexual cycle, but by an
audience that is elegant and abstract.
16. What will he have in Byzantium?

In Byzantium, he will have no age; past, present and future are all one there.

17. What is the major theme in the poem?

The poem's major theme is the transformative power of art; the ability of art to express
the ineffable and to step outside the boundaries of self. Some concrete details of the
poem might be read autobiographically, such as the speaker's desire to leave his
country, references to himself as an old man, "a tattered coat upon a stick", and having
a heart "sick with desire.

18. What is Byzantium?

Byzantium is the old name of Constantinople or Istanbul which was once the capital of
the Roman Empire. According to Yeats, the Christian Byzantium which influences the
scene after the fall of Rome was an ideal place of culture and wisdom.

19. What does the poet faces as expressed in the poem?

In the poem, "Sailing to Byzantium", the poet faces the old age and wishes to forget his
decaying body and educate his soul for immortality. Yeats' whole life has been devoted
to create everlasting pieces of art and he imagines that after death his soul will be a
golden bird resting in the Emperor's palace.

20. What is the final stanza of the poem?

In the final stanza, poet says that once he is out of the cycle of nature, (being begotten,
born and dying) he will seize contact with natural things-the physical world. The poet
wants to take a form that is of golden shape and has golden enameling.

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