Sailing to Byzantium
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"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 ten-syllable lines. It uses a journey to 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' "Sailing to Byzantium" describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of eternal life as well as his conception of paradise.
Written in 1926 (when Yeats was 60 or 61), “Sailing to Byzantium” is Yeats’s 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’ 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 (“what is past”), the present (that which is “passing”), and the future (that which is “to come”).
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First stanza
<poem>
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 unaging intellect.
</poem>
The speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is “no 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. There, “all summer long” the world rings with the “sensual music” that makes the young neglect the old, whom the speaker describes as “Monuments of unaging intellect.”
A most central fact appears when, for the first time, the poet actually experiences or is confronted by the eternal city's reality. The old man of "Sailing to Byzantium" imagined the city's power as being able to "gather" him into "the artifice of eternity"—presumably into "monuments of unageing intellect," immortal and changeless structures representative of or embodying all knowledge, linked like a perfect machine at the center of time. Yeats perfects and makes startlingly real what was previously only imagined as perfect when, in "Byzantium," he seems to envision an actual artifice of eternity and not eternal artifice. The city, as we shall see, generates—or actually smelts—eternal images: lifeless and deathless realities which finally supersede or consume all "complexities," all individual souls, all art, all the forms of temporal life. This contrast between the two poems is central to Yeats's re-imagining of his former theme. The old man, the poet's dramatic character, could not enter the city in reality because he was not dead and was not on a dolphin, as these are the conditions in which the living are conducted as souls to Byzantium; he came by means of artifice, by boat, and his "experience" of the city is solely his own creation. From the point of view of a living character the old man naturally imagines the city's eternity existing in fixed forms of perfect gold; the changeless matter of his "song" is already, perpetually, set, just as he is "set upon a branch to sing" forever "of what is past, passing, and to come." Even the natural form "bird" is never mentioned but merely implied in his speech: the old man is yearning for the perfect—to him, the perfectly unnatural—"bodily form," "such as Grecian goldsmiths make." It is clear in the later poem, once the human mouthpiece or mediator of the author's vision has been removed, that "the artifice of eternity" consists not of perfect forms or representations of eternity (the knowledge of all time) but of that which is nonetheless real yet finally without, or beyond, form and matter. Byzantium consists of the "substance" of what eternity actually is rather than some supposedly physical, changeless substance which, while being conceivable to the human mind, would necessarily involve form and matter and therefore the trappings of change and finity. Again, it would seem that Yeats is imagining and representing in the later poem the actual reality of what was merely conjectured or called upon by the old man of 1927. Apparently the "artifice of eternity" is much less human than that which was, then, imagined or desired.
Second stanza
<poem>
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.
</poem>
There is no evidence that within the action of the poem the old man is transformed. He reimagines himself not as an old man, "a tattered coat upon a stick," but outside of, free from, his decrepit nature and ephemerally-known time. He yearns for an eternal form, and the deadly irony of this desire is clear; imagining the answer to his prayer, the old man pictures himself as something of a golden robot, a hammered and enamelled bird, quaintly entertaining or pleasantly distracting with its pre-programmed (because eternal and changeless) song. It is difficult to imagine any reader feeling this to be a redemption, or even a freedom. The old man's wish is inhuman; he yearns to be reduced to what is essential in art, and nothing desirable to human life survives in the portrait of what, with such ardent despair, he wants to become.
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 of its own magnificence.” Therefore, the speaker has “sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” The speaker addresses the sages “standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall,” and asks them to be his soul’s “singing-masters.” He hopes they will consume his heart away, for his heart “knows not what it is”—it is “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal,” and the speaker wishes to be gathered “Into the artifice of eternity.”
Third stanza
<poem>
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.
</poem>
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 lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”
A comparison of the first stanzas of each poem is revealing. In the earlier work there is a distance between the speaker and that from whence he came, just as there is revealed a distance between the speaker and that towards which he yearns to move. In the first stanza of "Byzantium" there appears to be none of this physical or mental distance between speaker and subject, as it describes events inside the city, apparently as they occur in reality, or occur to the speaker's mind. Indeed the later poem makes use of a striking present tense in nearly every line, and the second stanza locates the images of the city directly before the speaker's eyes; thus the reader of "Byzantium" has an experience of the city which seems direct because barely mediated to the reader, and therefore strikes one as if it is an experience of a reality and not an idea or imagination of an experience. We are confronted in "Byzantium" with a profound contrast between what the old man in the 1927 poem imagined that eternity would be like, and what it is really like -- how the city actually works and what sort of things are there.
Fourth stanza
<poem>
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.
</poem>
A fascination with the artificial as superior to the natural is one of Yeats’s most prevalent themes. In a much earlier poem, 1899’s “The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart,” the speaker expresses a longing to re-make the world “in a casket of gold” and thereby eliminate its ugliness and imperfection. Later, in 1914’s “The Dolls,” the speaker writes of a group of dolls on a shelf, disgusted by the sight of a human baby. In each case, the artificial (the golden casket, the beautiful doll, the golden bird) is seen as perfect and unchanging, while the natural (the world, the human baby, the speaker’s body) is prone to ugliness and decay. What is more, the speaker sees deep spiritual truth (rather than simply aesthetic escape) 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.
Byzantium is symbolic of the world of art and poetry. "That is no country for old men" refers to the natural world. The "golden bough" is a reference to James Frazer's study, The Golden Bough.Those that are caught in the sensual music of the natural world neglect "monuments of unaging intellect." "Those dying generations" can't understand the eternal, or nearly eternal. Yeats encourages soul to clap its hands and sing, but warns that there is no school to teach singing other than to study monuments of soul's own magnificence. The "perne in a gyre" can be illuminated by Yeats's other work, "The Second Coming," which shows that the falcon in a gyre represents the breakdown of the natural world over time. In this poem it is a request for the sages of eternity to enter time for a space and teach the speaker what he is (or what his heart is) and to gather the speaker back to eternity. The last line is a call to all poets, with a hint of hope at the end...
Theme
The poem’s theme, Parker writes, is “the perfection of the human soul in a city of perfect and eternal art” yet he goes on to say “it soon becomes clear that the old man, who has but ‘come / To the holy city of Byzantium’ in the first two stanzas, merely implores in stanzas III and IV the powers of the city and imagines what will happen when his desperate prayer is answered” <ref name=Parker> Parker.‘Gather Me Into The Artifice of Eternity’. 2006</ref> . “Sailing to Byzantium” deals with the nature of the human soul. As Karl Parker writes, the fate of the soul of the speaker is never confirmed. His soul may never reach into eternity. The hope in his fate lies in the monuments of art that inspired his journey. Others have succeeded before him; his task is not an impossible one. If he does succeed, then his promised song may inspire others to make the long journey as well.
The poem is not about sailing to Byzantium, but about the need to leave one sort of place or society, where the attractions of living (associated with the ephemeral and with death) distract from the work of the soul (associated with eternity and immortality). The aristocratic characters of the final stanza make sense better as metaphors for high value rather than as sociopolitical beings, but would it not have been better to draw on a religious rather than a political ("Emperor") or sociopolitical hierarchy ("lords and ladies") for this purpose? If the inspiration of the poem is indeed the golden birds of Theophilus, this would explain them; but in that case would it not have been appropriate to inform the reader of this obscure classical allusion? But for Yeats, who has a taste for the esoteric, obscurity has a charm all its own.
Popular culture
- Robert Silverberg's 1984 novella, Sailing To Byzantium, uses Yeats's title and builds upon its themes.
- Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal also takes its title from the poem.
- Saul Bellow's novella Seize the Day describes protagonist Tommy Wilhelm as being "sick with desire".
- Canadian poet Leonard Cohen's "Montreal 1964" contains the lines "Canada is a dying animal/ I will not be fastened to a dying animal". Cohen has cited Yeats as an influence.
- Musician Lisa Gerrard uses "Sailing to Byzantium" as a track title on Immortal Memory (2004), while Juilliard-trained composer Michael Brown has set Yeats's work to music.
- Indie-rock band Liars use "Sailing to Byzantium" as a song title on their self-titled fourth album.
- American songwriter John Austin claims the poem as inspiration for his 1996 album, Byzantium.
- The title of the Guy Gavriel Kay novel Sailing To Sarantium is a transparent allusion to the story; it is a historical fantasy based on the actual history of Byzantium.
- The poem figures prominently in the Richard Powers novel Plowing the Dark, see esp. Chapter 26, and the novel shares its concern with the interplay of nature and artifice.
- Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel No Country for Old Men and the film by Joel and Ethan Coen take their title from the first line of the poem.
- Bruce Sterling's 1996 novel Holy Fire takes its title from the third stanza.
- In J. M. Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace, protagonist David Lurie observes of his native South Africa, "No country, this, for old men."
- In Anne Rice's novel The Vampire Armand, Armand opens his story by quoting the first stanza of the poem.
