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Sailing to Byzantium Summary & Analysis
by William Butler Yeats

Sailing to Byzantium Summary & Analysis
by William Butler Yeats

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “Sailing to Byzantium”

I

1That is no country for old men. The young

2In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

3—Those dying generations—at their song,

4The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

5Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

6Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

7Caught in that sensual music all neglect

8Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

9An aged man is but a paltry thing,

10A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

11Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

12For every tatter in its mortal dress,

13Nor is there singing school but studying

14Monuments of its own magnificence;

15And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

16To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

17O sages standing in God's holy fire

18As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

19Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

20And be the singing-masters of my soul.

21Consume my heart away; sick with desire

22And fastened to a dying animal

23It knows not what it is; and gather me

24Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

25Once out of nature I shall never take

26My bodily form from any natural thing,

27But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

28Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

29To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

30Or set upon a golden bough to sing

31To lords and ladies of Byzantium

32Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  • “Sailing to Byzantium” Introduction

    • “Sailing to Byzantium,” by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), reflects on the difficulty of keeping one’s soul alive in a fragile, failing human body. The speaker, an old man, leaves behind the country of the young for a visionary quest to Byzantium, the ancient city that was a major seat of early Christianity. There, he hopes to learn how to move past his mortality and become something more like an immortal work of art.

  • “Sailing to Byzantium” Summary

    • The speaker introduces readers to a world that has no room in it for the elderly. It's a world in which young lovers embrace under trees full of singing birds (who seem unaware of their own mortality), the waters swarm with fish, and every living thing—whether human, fish, or bird—is born and then dies. Everything in that country is so caught up in the moment that it can pay no attention to the things that might outlive the flesh.

      An old man in this world is nothing but a skinny, ratty old scarecrow, unless he can keep his soul alive, vital, and singing within his failing, worn out body. No one can teach the soul to do this: the person who wants to keep their soul alive has to figure it out through their own study. For this reason, the speaker has taken a voyage across the ocean to the ancient holy city of Byzantium.

      The speaker addresses Byzantium's long-dead wise men and saints, who are now caught up in the glorious fire of God, which is like the beautiful golden tiling that decorates Byzantine churches. He asks them to emerge from this fire, whirling in spirals like the bobbin of a spinning-wheel, and to teach his soul to sing. He wants them to burn up his mortal, fleshly heart, which is tethered to his failing body and can't fathom or accept its own mortality, and to take him up into their everlasting world of art.

      When he's left his body behind, the speaker says, he won't take up a mortal physical form again. Instead, he'll be a beautiful piece of golden art, something that metal workers in ancient Greece might have made to hang in an emperor's bedroom. Or he'll be a golden bird placed in a golden tree, where he, like the sages, can teach people his eternal and otherworldly wisdom—his transcendent understanding of the past, present, and future.

  • “Sailing to Byzantium” Themes

    • Theme Old Age and Mortality

      Old Age and Mortality

      This poem is, at least in part, about the difficulties of old age. To the speaker, the inevitable failure of the aging body presents a choice: the elderly can either fade into husks of their former selves, or learn to escape the physical limitations of old age by beautifying their souls—and, eventually, upon dying, becoming something that isn’t tied to the human body at all. The poem thus implies a separation between the body and soul, and presents old age as both a burden and an opportunity for a kind of spiritual transcendence—a chance to leave the earthly world, and all its limitations, behind.

      In the first stanza, the speaker vividly evokes the beautiful world of the young. The world is described through images of natural fertility and bounty: young people embracing, singing birds, vast schools of fish. This world is intensely focused on material pleasures and the creation of even more new life.

      But, as the speaker hints when he calls the singing birds “those dying generations” and observes that the happy young “neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect,” this world is also limited by its inability to accept the realities of aging. That is, the young are so self-absorbed, so wrapped up in these physical, bodily delights, that they can't yet appreciate their own mortality, and certainly can't achieve the kind of spiritual transcendence the speaker longs for.

      Indeed, an old man with a failing body can’t even pretend to fit in there. The poem's very first line, “That is no country for old men,” lets readers know that the speaker is totally at odds with this world. Even the word “that” separates the speaker from the country: it’s something over there, something he doesn’t belong to.

      The speaker then focuses on the failures of his aging body, which he describes as “a tattered coat”: not the substance of his real self, but just a garment he’s wearing. The only way to salvage such a garment, in turn, is for the soul to “clap its hands and sing.” The soul itself thus seems to have a body—but a different kind of body, one that can’t fade and weaken over time.

      Because there is no “singing school,” however, no one to teach the speaker's soul how to achieve such vibrancy, the speaker makes an imagined spiritual journey to the long-lost holy city of Byzantium. He's making this journey with his mind, not his body; he envisions leaving the body behind forever, in fact, and the power of his imagination helps him to move beyond his physical frailty. This again emphasizes the separation between the speaker's mortal body and his transcendent soul.

      Byzantium ceased to exist long ago (it is now modern-day Istanbul), and the "sages," or wise men, the speaker reaches out to are actually mosaics—real, famous artworks crafted from many tiny, often gilded (gold-covered) tiles. As such, the speaker is basically imagining traveling to a long-dead holy city and talking to mosaic icons on a wall. But that's the point: these sages have transcended old age and mortality through becoming the materials of imagination and of art. They have left their frail, physical bodies behind.

      The speaker intends to one day join them—and when he does, he’ll leave behind his body forever, and “never take / My bodily form from any natural thing.” In teaching his soul to imagine beyond the limits of his body, and eventually to leave it, he’ll learn to overcome mortality and old age.

      Part of this transcendence will come through the art he makes. Indeed, this poem itself is both a kind of song and a kind of mosaic: it’s musical, and it’s made of many little pieces (words, that is) put together. The art that the speaker leaves behind is another way of surviving past the limits of his mortal body, and, like the golden bird he imagines becoming, will still “sing” to later generations and teach them the wisdom he himself has learned.

    • Theme The Power of Art

      The Power of Art

      Closely related to the poem's ideas about aging, mortality, and the soul is its treatment of art. In the second half of the poem, the speaker reaches out to the world of art—to Byzantine mosaics—for answers to the struggles of old age and death. Art, here, is presented as a pathway to immortality. Art, the poem argues, can represent and preserve bodies that never change, and point to a bigger, transcendent reality: not just the reality of lives now vanished, but the reality of some different world beyond our own.

      The elderly speaker, having left behind the world of the young which no longer has room for him in his frailty, goes to seek spiritual rebirth in the ancient city of Byzantium—an ancient holy city that is now long-dead. He begins his third stanza by invoking “sages standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall.” Byzantium was famous for its beautiful mosaic art, and the sages reach the immortality of “God’s holy fire” by being a part of these mosaics. That is, they are forever preserved via art, ageless and undying. Thus, the “artifice of eternity” suggests that art both has the power to give humans a glimpse of eternity, and is itself a way to reach that eternity for themselves.

      The speaker wants to join them, in his own way, and his final vision of immortality is one that sums up the power of art—its ability to preserve the past, exist in the present, and endure into the future. Art, the speaker insists, also can still “sing,” speaking to future generations even after the artist is long gone.

      As such, when he has learned from the sages and left behind his body, the speaker says, he will never “take / My bodily form from any natural thing,” and describes instead taking the form of some piece of golden art. In this he might resemble one of the mosaics in which he sees the sages. But he may also take the form of a golden bird, though he doesn’t say so directly: in his other vision of his immortality, he sits on a bough and sings, just as the living birds in the first stanza do.

      The mortal body is left behind in the transition into immortality, but the artistic body remains: the speaker wishes to become art himself, to “sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium”—in short, to become a piece of art that might help other mortals to become a piece of art. In this role, he would “sing” of “what is past, or passing, or to come”—recording what was past, existing in the present, and enduring into the future.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Sailing to Byzantium”

    • Line 1

      That is no country for old men.

      The first line of the poem creates an immediate sense of the speaker's separation from the place he's about to describe. This alienation is evident from the very first word, in fact: a powerful, dismissive "That." The word "That" gives readers a sense that the speaker is already standing at a remove from whatever he's describing. While his body might be in the country he's about to describe, he feels far away from it.

      The sounds of this line are similarly telling. The sharp /t/ sound of "That" start readers off with a bang, but then the vowel sounds begin to slide and lengthen. Four variations of the /o/ vowel sounds appear in succession:

      no country for old men

      This combination of likeness and unlikeness (the sounds are similar, yet not quite the same) foreshadows the speaker's relationship to the country he feels himself to be so separate from. He will be able to see the world of the young from a position unlike that of its happy, lively inhabitants, but he also has a deep familiarity with their situation: he was, of course, once young, but is not anymore.

      The sentence is strong and declarative: no commas or other interruptions soften it. It also sits uneasily next to the rest of the line it belongs to. After the strong caesura of the period following "men," the reader encounters the beginning of a new sentence: "The young."

      Enjambment then separates "The young" from whatever it is that the speaker is going to say about them, so that those young people sit in isolation next to the first sentence's evocation of age:

      That is no country for old men. The young

      The reader immediately gets the sense that, whatever the reasons are that the country we're encountering is no good for old men, the young have something to do with it.

    • Lines 1-4

      The young
      In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
      —Those dying generations—at their song,
      The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

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    • Lines 5-8

      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.

    • Lines 9-12

      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,

    • Lines 13-14

      Nor is there singing school but studying
      Monuments of its own magnificence;

    • Lines 15-16

      And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
      To the holy city of Byzantium.

    • Lines 17-20

      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.

    • Lines 21-24

      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.

    • Lines 25-29

      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;

    • Lines 30-32

      Or set upon a golden bough to sing
      To lords and ladies of Byzantium
      Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  • “Sailing to Byzantium” Symbols

    • Symbol Gold

      Gold

      Gold is an ancient symbol not just for value and status, but for spiritual treasure. Because of its brilliance and the fact that it doesn't tarnish, it's often used to represent things of true deep worth—especially the riches of the soul.

      It serves all these roles here, and more. Gold, in "Sailing to Byzantium," is always associated with transcendent, eternal art. "God's holy fire" itself is likened to gold mosaic. In the final stanza, when the speaker is imagining what it will be like when his soul has truly moved beyond the confines of his body, he'll take on a form that is altogether golden—that is, immortal, beautiful, and perfected. Gold, in this poem, isn't just raw wealth, but an immortal beauty that has been painstakingly shaped.

    • Symbol Art

      Art

      Two kinds of artistry play powerful symbolic roles in "Sailing to Byzantium": music-making and visual art.

      These different art forms have a complicated relationship to each other here. Music and song are used as a metaphor for what the soul needs to do to attain immortality (as when the speaker asks the "sages" to be "the singing-masters of my soul"). Music is in some ways both an ephemeral and an eternal art: while songs can be passed down, they also disappear as soon as they're sung. Visual art-making, on the other hand, is a kind of preservation that outwits time in a different way. The speaker sees the "sages standing in God's holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall": here, the mosaic and eternal transcendence look just each other.

      The point here is that art doesn't just outlive humans, but somehow resembles eternity itself. This is "the artifice of eternity": art represents what is immortal through what is mortal, and in doing so helps humans to imagine something past their bodily lives.

    • Symbol Birds and birdsong

      Birds and birdsong

      Birds appear at two points in the poem: in the thoughtless world of the young, and in the transcendent world of Byzantium. They thus play a complicated role, serving at once as symbols of mortality and immortality.

      In the first stanza, the birds are called "those dying generations." These birds sing beautifully, yet (as animals) they're unaware of their own mortality. Their song here thus represents fleeting, ephemeral beauty.

      By the end of the poem, however, the speaker himself imagines taking on the form of a golden bird once he's out of his mortal body. In this role, he'll be able to communicate the wisdom of eternity to the living—to "sing," metaphorically, for all those "lords and ladies of Byzantium" who pass him by. Birdsong thus becomes something different here—instead of something beautiful yet fleeting, it becomes everlasting. A golden bird, of course, can't literally sing. Instead, as an undying work of art, this bird would bear witness to history—it could watch the world go by, and remind those who look upon it of the past, perhaps pushing them to reflect on all that this bird must have figuratively seen through the years.

    • Symbol Byzantium

      Byzantium

      Byzantium was an ancient Greek city that has an aura of legend around it (in spite of the fact it really existed). It was renamed Constantinople after the Emperor Constantine, who made it the capitol of the Roman Empire, and it later became modern-day Istanbul; its time as Byzantium was already in the distant past when Yeats wrote this poem.

      Byzantium is associated with ancient religion (including being an important seat of early Christianity), and it's famous for its beautiful icons and mosaic art.

      In "Sailing to Byzantium," both the fact that the city is long-lost and that its gorgeous art remains to this day make it a powerful symbol for spiritual immortality after death. While the civilizations that first built it have past, their art remains, and still connects with the speaker as an image of that which survives past the mortal body.

  • “Sailing to Byzantium” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Alliteration

      Alliteration is especially prominent in this poem because of the speaker's fondness for not only repeated sounds, but for repetition, period. For instance, in the second stanza, "sing" meets "sing" and "singing," and also matches up with "soul," "school," "studying," "sailed," and "seas." (See the Poetic Devices entry on "sibilance" for more on /s/ sounds specifically.)

      Similarly, /g/ sounds appear repeatedly, but across only a few words: "God" and "Grecian" both appear once, and there are five instances of "gold" or a word that starts with "gold" ("goldsmiths" in line 27 and "golden" in line 30). On a broad level, this alliteration (and repetition) makes the poem feel musical and lyrical—that is, like a work of art. This, in turn, reflects the poem's thematic idea that immortality can be achieved through art; the speaker is creating a work of art with this very poem, and in doing so a part of him lives on.

      Other times the alliteration serves to draw readers' attention to certain words and phrases. In line 5, for instance, the alliteration of the /f/ sound in "Fish, flesh, or fowl" connects these three words, placing them on the same level and underscoring that they are all subject to the same fate. As the speaker says in the next line, again heightening the phrase with alliteration, "Whatever is begotten, born, and dies." That is, all living things—be they fish, human beings, or birds—must die.

    • Apostrophe

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    • Assonance

    • Caesura

    • Diacope

    • Enjambment

    • Paradox

    • Parataxis

    • Sibilance

  • “Sailing to Byzantium” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Salmon-falls
    • Mackerel
    • Fowl
    • Begotten
    • Sensual
    • Paltry
    • Tattered
    • Byzantium
    • Sages
    • Mosaic
    • Perne
    • Gyre
    • Artifice
    • Enamelling
    Salmon-falls

    • Little waterfalls in a river, where one might see salmon leaping.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Sailing to Byzantium”

    • Form

      "Sailing to Byzantium" is made up of four stanzas, each with eight lines (making them octaves). The poem also follows the ancient pattern of ottava rima (see "Meter" and "Rhyme Scheme" for more details on how this works), but it doesn't use a particular poetic form beyond that. However, it's still a poem with a powerful and regular shape.

      For one thing, these stanzas are further separated by Roman numerals, marking each as I, II, III, and IV. This creates the sensation of a poem created of vignettes, of short, self-contained scenes within a broader shared world. Indeed, the first stanza describes the world of the young; the second focuses on why the speaker must go to Byzantium; the third focuses on what the speaker then finds there, what he asks of the "sages"; and the fourth and final stanza envisions what the speaker will become after his death.

      What's more, Yeats, who was deeply interested in the occult and the magical, like would have known that the number four was traditionally associated with the body and the physical world. The four regular stanzas of this poem thus reflect its subject. Here, the "singing" soul—the poetry itself—is bound by the solid walls of the stanzas. While the speaker longs to transcend his physical body, he has to start from within it.

    • Meter

      "Sailing to Byzantium" primarily uses iambic pentameter — that is, a line of five iambs, or poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed beat pattern. Take line 9:

      An aged man is but a paltry thing

      But, as is often the case with poems that use iambic pentameter as their base, this rhythm isn't totally consistent throughout. Even the very first line does something irregular:

      That is no country for old men. The young

      This line has six stresses instead of the typical five. The front-loaded beginning, with heavy stresses on "That," "no country," and "old men," helps to create the sense that the speaker is at odds with the lyrical and delightful world of the young that he goes on to describe in a much more regular iambic rhythm. Indeed, the next line is much more regular, except for a trochee (stressed-unstressed) right after the caesura:

      In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

      Throughout the poem, the reader will find that the speaker also breaks his iambic rhythm in moments of special emphasis, change, or stress, as he does in line 19:

      Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre

      He falls back into relatively regular iambs in moments of establishing detail, and in moments of peace or mystery. Take lines 25-26, where he describes what form he wants his soul to take after his death:

      Once out of nature I shall never take
      My bodily form from any natural thing

      The rhythm isn't perfect here, but in general there are five pulsing beats in each line. This keeps up a steady heartbeat under the passionate and disruptive energy of the speaker's desires. The meter here has both constancy and wildness in it.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      "Sailing to Byzantium" uses ottava rima, an ancient rhyme scheme that runs like this:

      ABABABCC

      Ottava rima has a long history. It was first used, as far as we know, by the medieval Italian poet Boccacio. Because of its flexibility, it was often used for longer narrative poems. The speaker's use of it here thus lends the poem an epic quality.

      The rhyme scheme of "Sailing to Byzantium" is, however, not totally regular. The speaker often uses slant rhyme, as when he rhymes "unless" and "dress" with "magnificence," or "wall," soul," and "animal." These slant rhymes are partly pragmatic (there just aren't as many rhyme-words in English as there are in Italian, the language where ottava rima originated), but they're also meaningful. In these slightly mismatched rhymes, readers often see the speaker confronting the mismatch between the transcendent beauty of the soul and the limitations of the physical world: consider that wall/soul/animal rhyme, for instance.

      The C couplets that end each stanza, however, all rhyme perfectly. Note that those end rhymes are the only places where the word "Byzantium" appears within the poem—and that in both instances, "Byzantium" is rhymed with "come." The speaker's longing for the transcendence he represents with the ancient city is spelled out in rhyme.

  • “Sailing to Byzantium” Speaker

    • The speaker, readers can safely say, is an old man. His whole perspective on the world and the action of the poem are founded on his reaction to his own age. In the first and second stanzas, he reveals his sadness at the indignities of old age: old men can't participate in the world of the young, and if they're not careful, they become shells of themselves.

      But the speaker is not resigned to such a decline, nor to irrelevance. Rather, he is passionately devoted to an ideal: he will keep his soul alive, and teach it to sing even as his physical body dies.

      The speaker's voyage to Byzantium is an internal, spiritual journey. Only by going deep into himself and offering his soul up to eternity can he transcend his failing outer self. The man who can make such a journey—and who knows that he has to make it—is something of a visionary.

  • “Sailing to Byzantium” Setting

    • "Sailing to Byzantium" might be said to have three locations: in the world of the young, in Byzantium, and in the speaker's mind, which contains both of these places!

      The place that is "no country for old men" has a hint of paradise in it: it's a place of fertility, sensuality, and abundant life. This is the world as it looks to someone who feels old and irrelevant: even if "those dying generations" are mortal, they're also full of unthinking and vibrant life—for now.

      Byzantium, on the contrary, is a place of intangible things. The speaker can reach it only through a voyage of the imagination, as it has long vanished, transformed into a different place (the city became Constantinople under the Romans in 330 CE, and is now Istanbul). It's also a world of art and artistry. Where the country of the young is full of things that spontaneously grow, Byzantium is the land of things that are made.

      While the growing world may have more of a solid reality than the imagined Byzantium, both are products of the speaker's mind: his perspective on the world around him turns it into the land of the young, and Byzantium can be visited only in his visions.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Sailing to Byzantium”

      Literary Context

      William Butler Yeats was an influential Irish poet, most active around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who were experimenting with free verse, Yeats loved old verse forms; his use of ottava rima in "Sailing to Byzantium" is just one example of his command of traditional poetic styles. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for his works.

      Yeats was most deeply influenced by the poets of a generation or two before him—for instance, the visionary poetry of the Romantic poet William Blake and the works of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. His taste for magic and the occult (both enjoying a renaissance during his lifetime) shows up in the mysticism of his verse. He can also be classed as a Symbolist: an artist reacting against a predominating Victorian naturalism in favor of work influenced by dreams, imagination, and visions.

      Yeats wrote "Sailing to Byzantium" in 1926, when he was in his 60s, and said of it: "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.'"

      Historical Context

      "Sailing to Byzantium" was written during a chaotic period of Irish history. In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, when Irish Republican forces rebelled against British occupation, a small group of Northern counties formed what was known as the Irish Free State. Yeats, who was a long-time Irish Republican, served as a senator for this state. In this position, he wrote an important polemic against Catholic anti-divorce sentiment. "Sailing to Byzantium" was written during his time as a senator.

      Yeats was also fascinated by the rise of Fascist governments on the European continent, and had some Fascist sympathies. While Yeats's belief in the value of the individual soul in "Sailing to Byzantium" might seem inflected by a democratic spirit, politically he was not a fan of rule by citizens.

  • More “Sailing to Byzantium” Resources

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