Sailing to Byzantium / Yeats

"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'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 (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’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 (“what is past”), the present (that which is “passing”), and the future (that which is “to come”).

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 (though one must remember that the world of becoming is a meaningless flux aside from the world of being which it implies)".

In popular culture

 * Robert Silverberg's 1984 novella, Sailing To Byzantium, uses Yeats's title and builds upon its themes.
 * Some readers and reviewers assume that the title of Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal is derived from the third stanza of 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.
 * 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.
 * Poet R.S. Gwynn includes the line "An aged man is but a paltry thing" in his cento, "Approaching a Significant Birthday he Peruses the Norton Anthology of Poetry"