Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees -
Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Commentary
from ‘The Tower’, 1928
Another Yeats poem, so soon after the first one? Yes indeed. As Amit commented on my very first posting, “Yeats’ peoms resonate with my feelings in a way that few others’ poems do.” I couldn’t agree more. There’s a certain magic to his words which I can’t even begin to describe, much less analyze or understand. Suffice to say that this list will be seeing a lot more of Yeats in the future :-).
Biographical Note (from good old Louis Untermeyer):
Born at Sandymount, Dublin, in 1865, the son of John B. Yeats, the Irish artist, the greater part of William Butler Yeats’ childhood was spent in Sligo. Here he became imbued with the power and richness of native folk-lore; he drank in the racy quality through the quaint fairy stories and old wives’ tales of the Irish peasantry. (Later he published a collection of these same stories.)
It was in the activities of a “Young Ireland” society that Yeats became identified with the new spirit; he dreamed of a national poetry that would be written in English and yet would be definitely Irish. In a few years he became one of the leaders in the Celtic revival. He worked incessantly for the cause, both as propagandist and playwright; and, though his mysticism at times seemed the product of a cult rather than a Celt, his symbolic dramas were acknowledged to be full of a haunting, other-world spirituality. (See Preface.) The Hour Glass (1904), his second volume of “Plays for an Irish Theatre,” includes his best one-act dramas with the exception of his unforgettable The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894). The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) contains several of his most beautiful and characteristic poems.
Another Biographical Note, this one from George Macbeth:
… Yeats shared [Kipling’s and d’Annuncio’s] fascination with poetry as a public art, almost a branch of rhetoric… [He] is now generally regarded as the greatest English poet of the century… … Yeats is not, however, an English poet at all; he is an Irish poet. His work can be seen as falling into three periods: the early, rather misty, mythological poems of the Celtic twilight period, the concrete particularising poems of his middle years, and the more dandified, violemt mythological poems which occupied him at the end of his life… His greatest successes [were in] writing about his friends and he causes for which they spoke, fought and died… Irish history and Irish politics came alive to Yeats through the doings of people he knew and loved. His best work is a commentary on the history of a whole country at the establishment of its freedom, a period of agonising crisis seen through the eyes of a particularly sensitive and involved member of it…
Macbeth’s comments on ‘Sailing to Byzantium’:
… the myth of Byzantium as a magical city where life was entirely transmuted into art inspired Yeats to some of his finest poetic flights… He seems to give life beyond this world a special sort of concrete grace and ceremony…
Finally, my own (somewhat disconnected) thoughts:
There’s a shimmering, almost ethereal grace to this poem… at the same time, I can’t help being dazzled by its richness and complexity of allusion and connotation… every time I read it, a thousand historical and mythologial associations spring to my mind… the language is vintage Yeats, as vibrant and rich and bewitchingly beautiful as ever… all in all, a true work of art…
— Thomas
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Ron and Shirley Johnson · 9 June 2000
I have found a new poetry contest that I think you might be interested in it’s called Project Frost it’s being done by a literary student in Iowa email your questions to just thought I would pass the information on and you should do the same.
Rich Kalsi · 29 January 2001
When I first read this poem in college, I was immediately struck by the controlled vibrancy of Yeats’ language. How he achieves its effects upon the soul still remains a mystery to me. But rather than attempt to explain this mystery by throroughly analyzing its poetic forms or its literary allusions, I want it to remain a mystery. For me the unexplained aspects of the poem give it a power and trajectory I feel analysis would only destroy. As I sat in class and heard the words pouring from my professor’s lips, what appealed to me immediately was the poem’s somberness. It doesn’t attempt to glorify life, nor the after-life. Its reduction of a complex metaphysical idea into tangible images culled from experience makes it an eternal poem, one whose relevance will never be dulled by time.
Cer1115 · 11 November 2001
I was asined this poem to do an essay on and I have no idea where to start on this poem. I liked it after I read it a few time. Cathy
Radek Niezgódka · 6 October 2002
Hi, I would like to know something more about “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Wild Swans at Coole”. About emotional and historical background of these poems and generally what inspired Yeats to write them.
Florian Frisch · 16 January 2003
Philip Roth makes a quotation from this Yeats poem the essence - and title - of one of his novels: The dying animal. That becomes very interesting intertextuality, readig Roth’s novel and the lines: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal”.
MrsMaster27 · 20 June 2003
Hi I would like to know more about “Sailing to Byzantium”
Rhanda Dormeus · 26 June 2003
Hi,
I am struggling through an analytical essay for this poem (Sailing to Byzantium. Please help, I am not understanding it.
R. Dormeus
Peter Chant · 30 May 2004
Hi
Studied this poem at UBC, university of BC 1977 - yeah I am old…I can relate to “ An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,Love the poem.Thanks for posting it.Peter.
calamity · 18 November 2004
I work in a nursing home. Once we had a retired teacher living there. He had dementia and we often saw him ragibg and striking out at staff.I once heard him repeat the line about old men and recited the lines following. For once he looked at me and smiled.
Nancy Fletcher · 16 July 2006
I think that I identify with this one because of my age. I am 54 and a graduate student of English. I believe that Yeats was 55 when he wrote it. I can relate to the feeling that my mind is still young, but “fastened to a dying animal.” Age is so unfair.
Colin · 10 April 2007
My comment:
“Sailing to Byzantium” describes the wish for eternal life through the greatness of his art that Yeats longed for as he grew older. It was maddening to him that his muse had continued to grow in power as his body deteriorated around him. The soul inside still vital, his body was “a tattered coat upon a stick,” he was in effect a scarecrow, an image he referred to many times in his last works.
The cosmology he outlined in both drafts of “A Vision,” call for men to cycle through different lives corresponding to the 28 phases of the moon. Each life either waxing or waning from the two antipodes, the primary man and the antithetical. Yeats thought of himself as being at the pinnacle of the antithetical, individualistic phase of this cycle and hated the idea of dying and having to start all over like every one else. To become something less than he felt he was. The fear of this indignity lead him at the end of his life to amend his cosmology to allow truly great men and artists to survive in soul outside the eternal cycles and gyres of time as he had originally outlined them. Byzantium is a representation of this sort of immortality, where he himself would be a work of art like the golden clockwork birds of Greek mythology, eternally the same to be enjoyed and revered, unchanging. This idea of stepping outside of nature is a common one in his late work. Condsider his wish to join the Celtic Sidhe, the mythological riders in the sky watching over all of Irishry in “Under Ben Bulben.” Consider the Old Stone Face, the immortality of which he longed to posess.
In the end “Sailing to Byzantium” is not so much about fear of death, as it is about longing for not only immortality of who he felt he was through art and the wish to avoid the indignity of rejoining the rest of the human race in death.
Anyhoo, that was my take on it.
Colin D. Garland
Hall Girard D · 9 May 2007
I had to analyze this poem for an English class.(freshman English, it seems). I still am not sure what it ;means and it was quite a challenge for a 21 year old college kid. However I think I made an A on it. Im at work now, and I’ve had some fellow workers look at it and their opinions as to what it is about vary greatly. Oh well, thanks girard
Rosemary Brough · 3 June 2007
Mieneke Jansen recommends that those who do not understand this poem visit ‘homepage.tinet.ie..’ etc. But the essay there is full of spelling mistakes and errors in punctuation. Who wrote it ?