"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 lines of iambic pentameter. It uses a journey to 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.
Synopsis
Written in 1926, "Sailing to Byzantium" is Yeats' 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". 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, the present, and the future.
Interpretation
Yeats wrote in a draft script for a 1931 BBC broadcast:
I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts about that subject I have put into a poem called 'Sailing to Byzantium'. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jeweled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.
John Crowe Ransom comments: "The prayer is addressed to holy sages who dwell I know not where; it does not seem to matter where, for they seem qualified to receive the prayer, and it is a qualified and dignified prayer." Epifanio San Juan writes that the action of the poem "occurs in the tension between memory and desire, knowledge and intuition, nature and history, subsumed within a vision of eternal order". Cleanth Brooks asks whether, in this poem, Yeats chooses idealism or materialism and answers his own question, "Yeats chooses both and neither. One cannot know the world of being save through the world of becoming ".
Influence
A science fiction novella by the same name by Robert Silverberg was published in 1985. The story, like the poem, deals with immortality and includes quotations from the poem. The title for Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was taken from the first line of the poem. A second poem written by W. B. Yeats: "Byzantium" extends and complements "Sailing to Byzantium". It blends descriptions of the medieval city in nighttime darkness with spiritual, supernatural and artistic imagery. Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay's historical fantasy duology The Sarantine Mosaic was inspired by this poem. A song on Lisa Gerrard and Patrick Cassidy's 2004 albumImmortal Memory was named after the poem.
