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13.9: Sailing to Byzantium

  • Page ID
    3221
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    [1]

    I

    That[2] 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.

    II

    An aged man is but a paltry thing,
    A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
    Soul clap its hands and sing,[3] 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.

    III

    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,[4]
    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.

    IV
    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[5]
    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.

    1928

    Contributors and Attributions


    1. In A Vision, the book wherein he outlines his personal philosophy, Yeats identified sixth-century Byzantium (present-day Istanbul in Turkey) as his idea of Utopia. The unity of purpose among citizens from all walks of life to create a city that revealed their reverence for art, poetry, music, and architecture was, for Yeats, a model all nations, especially Ireland, should follow. ↵
    2. Ireland. ↵
    3. One of Yeats’s favourite poets was William Blake (1757-1827), who claimed he saw the soul of a brother who had just died, rise out of his body and ascend to heaven, clapping its hands for joy as it did so. Here Yeats says old age is “a paltry thing” unless we can renew our spirit. ↵
    4. To “perne” means to spin; the gyre is the ever-widening spiral, Yeats's favourite symbol of the progress of life and civilization. The “sages” on the Byzantium mosaics approach the poet in this manner to symbolize his spiritual rebirth. ↵
    5. In Yeats’s own note to this poem, he references the golden mechanical birds which sat in a tree in the emperor’s palace in Byzantium and sang. Yeats wants to be reincarnated as one of these birds, to end the cycle of birth and rebirth, once he is “Out of nature.” The singing echoes his own profession as a poet. ↵

    13.9: Sailing to Byzantium is shared under a CC BY license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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