Poetry: Sailing to Byzantium

Overview
William Butler Yeats’s 1927 poem Sailing to Byzantium charts a visionary journey from a world absorbed in youth and sensual life to a realm of spiritual and artistic permanence. The speaker, conscious of old age, rejects the vitality of the natural world as an insufficient measure of value and seeks instead the enduring clarity of art and intellect. Byzantium, the ancient city famed for its mosaics and religious splendor, becomes the emblem of a place where transient life is refined into lasting form. Across four tightly structured stanzas, the poem moves from lament to invocation to transformation, ending in a striking image of the self remade as a crafted, eternal artifact.

Summary
The poem opens with a stark declaration: the speaker’s country is “no country for old men.” Everywhere, the living world is brimming with desire and reproduction, the young embracing, birds in trees, fish in the sea, its pulse a “sensual music” that enthralls the senses but leaves old age on the margins. In such a place, the monuments of “unageing intellect” are neglected, and the speaker resolves to leave for Byzantium, a symbolic destination where the soul and the works of art are honored.

In the second stanza, the speaker describes the plight of old age: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick,” unless the soul animates itself by singing. There is no “singing school” in the country of youth; true instruction for the spirit lies in contemplating “monuments of its own magnificence”, the great works of art and the spiritual achievements that transcend time. The voyage to Byzantium is, in essence, a voyage toward that schooling.

The third stanza becomes an invocation. Addressing the sages depicted in Byzantine mosaics, “standing in God’s holy fire as in the gold mosaic of a wall,” the speaker begs them to be his “singing-masters.” He asks them to burn away his mortal heart, “sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal,” and to gather him into “the artifice of eternity.” The body is figured as a failing creature; the heart is ensnared by appetites. Through this purgative flame, the speaker seeks a new condition beyond the decay of flesh and the distractions of the senses.

In the final stanza, the speaker imagines the form he will take “once out of nature.” He will not return in any natural guise but will be remade as a crafted work: a golden bird fashioned by “Grecian goldsmiths,” hammered and enameled, fit to perch upon a golden bough in Byzantium. As that emblem of perfected art, he will sing to “lords and ladies” not of bodily delights but of what is “past, passing, or to come”, a prophetic, timeless music that outlasts the cycle of life and death.

Themes and Imagery
The poem stages a confrontation between nature’s flux and art’s permanence. Images of ripeness and reproduction, birds, fish, the “salmon-falls,” the “mackerel-crowded seas”, suggest an endlessly renewing cycle that nonetheless discards the old. In answer, Yeats offers the burnished stillness of Byzantine mosaics and the crafted golden bird, artifacts that preserve pattern, meaning, and consciousness against time. By invoking sages in “holy fire,” the poem entwines religious transfiguration with artistic making, proposing that the soul’s salvation occurs through disciplined attention to enduring forms. The journey to Byzantium is thus both literal and symbolic: a passage from the body’s desires to the mind’s hard-won, luminous permanence.