Autobiography of william butler yeats sailing

Sailing to Byzantium / William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats
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Poem by William Butler Yeats

For the novella by Robert Silverberg, see Sailing to Byzantium (novella).

"Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in his collection October Blast, in 1927 and then 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 (Constantinople) 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. The poem was dedicated to the artist Norah McGuinness.

Synopsis

Written in 1926 (when Yeats was 60 or 61), "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" (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." This is a reference to the legend that when the Turks entered the church (Hagia Sophia) in 1453, the priests who were singing the Divine Liturgy took up the sacred vessels and disappeared into the wall of the church, where they will stay and only come out when the church is returned to Christendom (see Timothy Gregory, A History of Byzantium, page 337). 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

Sailing to Byzantium did not come easily to Yeats. Notoriously fastidious and perfectionist in the practice of his art, nineteen surviving drafts of the poem make it clear that it caused him great labour. He once wrote to Katherine Tynan: ‘I envy your power of writing stray snatches of verse. I cannot do it at all. With me everything is premeditated for a long time.’

The poem went through its preliminary stages during the very hot summer of 1926 while Yeats was staying at Muckross House in County Kerry. It was the home of Bourne Vincent, a wealthy acquaintance who had offered him a temporary escape from his busy life in Dublin. By this time Yeats was a Senator of the Irish Free State, a famous poet and playwright and winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for literature.

Despite this worldly success, Yeats’ life was hardly one of unsullied sweetness and light. He loathed what he experienced as the barren materialism that characterised everyday life and found in his art the only available antidote to it. He had endured endless battles against the philistinism of his own country, especially with regard to the establishment and maintenance of the Abbey Theatre. Although only sixty-one, his physical health was poor. He was probably feeling much older than his years and wondering what life had left to offer him.

What are believed to be Yeats’ first jottings for the poem suggest that his initial theme focused on past sexual encounters, some loving and others simply carnal. This was important to Yeats because he associated sexual potency with quality of life, regrettable loss of the former being equated with unavoidable loss of the latter. Subsequent drafts of the poem indicate that there were many other false starts. Fresh themes were introduced and then abandoned, some of which found their way four years later into his poem, Byzantium.

It seems clear that Yeats began with only a vague, instinctive awareness of what he wanted his poem to express. The creativity

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.

This poem is in the public domain.