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.

1. SAILING TO
BYZANTIUM

2. The poem 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 describes the
metaphorical journey of a man pursuing
his own vision of eternal life as well as
his conception of paradise.
Sailing to Byzantium written in 1926 is an
emphatic reminder of the poet’s keen
interest in that historic city of Eastern Empire
and the significance of art and culture.
About the Poem:

3. “That is no country for old men The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees”
The speaker, referring to the country (Ireland)
that he has left, says that it is not the 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.
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless”
An old man, the speaker says, is a “paltry thing,”
merely a tattered coat upon a stick, unless his soul
can clap its hands and sing; and the only way for
the soul to learn how to sing is to study
monuments.
“And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium”
the speaker has sailed the seas and come to the
holy city of Byzantium. The speaker addresses the
sages standing in the gold mosaic of a wall and asks
them to be his soul’s “singing-masters.”
Summary:

4. He hopes the Saints will consume his heart
away and 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 the lords and ladies of Byzantium.
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’s song will be different from
the sensual music of the dying
generations and he will sing of the
monuments of unageing intellect.
Summary...

5. In the metrical form, Sailing to Byzantium
follows an Ottava Rima stanza pattern.
Form:
The four eight-line stanzas takes a very old
verse form: they are metered in iambic
pentameter, and rhymed ABABABCC, two trios
of alternating rhyme followed by a couplet.
Yeats, however, modifies the form to suit his
own purpose, using ten syllables instead of
the original eleven and using slant rhymes
instead of exact ones.
Metrically, each is quite complicated; the lines
are loosely iambic, with the first, second,
third, fifth, and eighth lines in pentameter, the
fourth line in tetrameter, and the sixth and
seventh line in trimeter, so that the pattern of
line-stresses in each stanza is 55545335.

6. Critical Analysis:
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.
Yeats gave definitive statement about the agony
of old age and the imaginative and spiritual
work required to remain a vital individual.
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.
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.

7. A fascination with the artificial as superior to
the natural is one of Yeats’s most prevalent
themes.
The speaker expresses a longing to
re-make the world and thereby
eliminate its ugliness and imperfection.
The speaker sees deep spiritual truth 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.
Its main theme is the triumph of art over death.
The poet sails to Byzantium, portrayed as a
city where art and religion predominate,
and aging sages and poets and musicians
can make works of everlasting beauty.
The tone is simultaneously elegiac
(in its treatment of age) and
triumphant (in its praise of art).
Critical Analysis…

8. Yeats made its significance
clear in a script he wrote for a BBC
radio broadcast in 1931:
“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”.
Why Byzantium?

9. The Byzantine Greeks (or Byzantines) were a
medieval Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian
people. They were the main inhabitants of the
lands of the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman
Empire), of Constantinople and Asia Minor
(modern Turkey) .
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Byzantine
Greeks self-identified as ’Romans’, but are
referred to as ‘Byzantines’ and ‘Byzantine
Greeks’ in modern historiography.
The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the
Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of
the Roman Empire in the East during Late
Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital
city was Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul,
which had been founded as Byzantium).
Constantine became emperor of the
Eastern Roman Empire in 306. He built a new
capital city, called Constantinople.
The Byzantine Empire:

10. The poem is one of Yeats’s finest, and is worth
the effort to analyse and unpick his difficult
imagery and symbolism. One of the great
meditations on ageing and wisdom, Sailing to
Byzantium is elusive and even mystical, but the
entire better for it.
Yeats in his poem explains bout the
domes, mosaics and enamel work of
Hagia Sophia as pure art divorced from
nature and removed from time and
space.
Yeats’s Images:
Yeats’s images require further analysis for
instance, the final stanza with its image of the
gold singing bird , Yeats himself recalled that he
had read somewhere that in the Emperor’s
palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold
and silver, and artificial birds that sang.
‘Golden bough’ is also a loaded phrase.

11. Following are examples of figures of speech in the poem.
Alliteration
Repetition of consonant sounds
Line 4: The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Line 5: Fish, flesh, or fowl,
Apostrophe
Addressing an abstraction or a thing, present or
absent; addressing an absent entity or person;
addressing a deceased person.
Line 17: O sages standing in God's holy fire
Metaphor
Line 8: Monuments of unageing
intellect. Comparison of old men to monuments
Lines 9-10: Comparison of an old man's skin to a
tattered coat and his skeleton to a stick.
Labyrinth definition: In classical mythology, a vast
maze on the island of Crete. The great inventor
Daedalus designed it, and the king of Crete kept the
Minotaur in it.
Figures of Speech:

12. Symbolism:
The use of symbolism is very important throughout
the poem. The title of the poem contains 2
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 symbolises 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
symbolising everything that Yeats wants to reject in
his mortal existence.

13. The symbol of music and song 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.
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 quality of gold, by virtue of its
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.
Symbolism...

14. Theme:
Yeats wrote sailing to Byzantium in order to emphasis
beauties of art.
Allegory:
Allegory of this poem is an allegory for the turning away
from the body and nature to the soul and art. And, just as the
first stanza conveys a rich sense of the fecundity if nature, so
the second stanza communicates on enormous intellectual
excitement, as in the vivid images of the old man as a
scarecrow and the soul clapping each hands and singing.
Paradox:
The poet wishes to be out of nature (dead),
imaging himself as an artificial bird, yet paradoxically
the subject of the golden bird's song is time and the
natural process.
Metaphors:
“No country for old men” (Geographic metaphor). “An
aged man” is but paltry thing: poet compares himself to the
scarecrow. “And fastened to a dying animal” poet compares
himself to a dead animal.

15. Assistant Professor,
Indo -American College, Cheyyar.
Available @ : 9751660760
E-mail: rajmohan251@gmail.com
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