![]() 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"). 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). 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. 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). 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. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and the human spirit may converge. It uses a journey to Byzantium ( Constantinople) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. It comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight lines of iambic pentameter. " Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928 collection The Tower. Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder singĪnd therefore I have sailed the seas and comeĬome from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,īut such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,įish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long – Those dying generations – at their song, ![]() In one another's arms, birds in the trees
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