Sailing to Byzantium


"Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928 collection The Tower. It comprises four stanzas, each made up of eight ten-syllable lines. It depicts a portion of an old man's journey to Constantinople. Through this 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.
Contents


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 unageing intellect.

As a literal paraphrase, the first stanza consists of the speaker describing his former country, a place that is not oriented toward the aged. Here, youthful denizens embrace one another, perhaps in young love (I.2). The birds, termed "dying generations" (I.3) by the speaker, perch and sing in the trees. Lines four through six repeat a similar combination of the natural world and the natural cycle of life and death; rivers and streams teeming with fish, with birds circling above, and all life recognizing and accepting that all that which is born must die. With the closing couplet of the first stanza, the speaker summarizes why he mentions these observations about the natural world. This world of circulating life and death blinds the enraptured mortals from the immortal realm of the artistic and spiritual.