Sailing to Byzantium

'Sailing to Byzantium': Analysis

The context of the poem

When poet William Butler Yeats wrote 'Sailing to Byzantium' he was 62 and had been married less than a decade to Georgie Hyde-Lees, a much younger woman. William Butler Yeats and Georgie Hyde-Lees were both deeply spiritual. Hyde-Lees was a youthful, intellectual and spiritual counterpart to an ageing Yeats who hadn't yet had children at age 52. Yeats married Hyde-Lees in part as a result of her youth (she was 25 when they were wed). Yeats as a poet is concerned with a kind of existential dread about ageing and continuing legacy in much of his work. Yeats' preoccupation with his age began nearly a decade earlier as his lifelong lover Maude Gonne, as well as her daughter, consistently rejected Yeats' proposals and he moved onward to Hyde-Lees, looking for a companion in his old age that would keep him feeling young and intellectually engaged.

'Sailing to Byzantium' calls back to Yeats' Protestant Ascendancy background and references some other spiritual beliefs such as the soul being separate from the body, and an afterlife. Byzantium (later renamed Constantinople and then later Istanbul) was a place that was a strong seat for Christianity and Christian belief systems early on in the religion.

'Sailing to Byzantium': Summary

We will try to summarize the entire point of the poem and the author's ideas

Stanza I

William Butler Yeats opens the first stanza of the poem 'Sailing to Byzantium' with a world in which there is no place for the elderly. The speaker is one such elderly individual.

We see images of young people in one another's arms and birds in the trees, and see other animals (fish, flesh, or fowl) going through the summer blissfully and joyfully unaware of their mortality.

Fig. 1 - The speaker notes the vitality of birds in a tree.

In the last three lines of the stanza, the speaker states that all things that are born die, and none of these young creatures take time to explore the things that keep the soul lively.

Stanza II

Stanza two begins with a description of an old man as "a tattered coat upon a stick", something akin to a scarecrow, unless the soul is a lively thing that claps and sings to keep itself young. The speaker goes on to state that despite the necessity for a singing soul, there is no one that can teach the soul how to do this except the speaker himself.

Every person's individual soul must be maintained through the person's own study, as opposed to a "singing school". Therefore, the speaker says, he has gone on a quest to the ancient city of Byzantium to study how to keep his soul singing.

Stanza III

Stanza three is critical for the speaker. The speaker has arrived in Byzantium and begins the stanza with an apostrophe, calling out to the sages or saints in the holy fire of God to teach his soul how to sing.

Even though he says in the second stanza that there is no "singing school" to teach his soul to sing, he begs the sages in the mosaics to burn his heart up, as it is weak and cannot accept its own mortality. He then asks to be gathered into the "artifice of eternity", referring to the eternal nature of art- as it lives on past the mortal "dying animal" that is the body.

Stanza IV

In this final stanza, the speaker muses about the decisions that he'll make in the afterlife. He says that once he has passed, he'll never again take the form of a "natural" thing. Rather, he wants to be as the golden art made by the Greeks – housed in a room entertaining an emperor or, perhaps, a bird made of gold sitting on a branch.

The speaker, in these lines, desires to immortalize himself so that he doesn't have to tolerate the ageing of his natural form. He wants to give wisdom to those trying to make their souls sing as the sages can, knowing all that has passed and what is yet to come.

Sailing to Byzantium: Themes

While 'Sailing to Byzantium' is a dense poem that interrogates many central themes of humanity and the nature of life, here are three to get you started on your poem analysis.

Mortality

'Sailing to Byzantium' is, at its core, a poem interested in the mortality of the human body. The speaker opens the poem by noting that elderly people are more attuned to the process of ageing and the concept of mortality than the young or the ignorant creatures of the world, such as fish or birds, and references the body as a "dying animal". The poem is, in part, an homage to the difficulties of ageing from a very personal speaker, who uses a first-person pronoun "I". There is a universality in this fear of ageing and old age. As the poem continues, there is an exploration not only of what it means to be mortal, but what it means to be immortal like the sages in the mosaics in Byzantium.

Byzantium is an ancient city, and symbolizes, in many ways, the desires of the speaker to become immortalized. The symbol of Byzantium is explored further later on. The preoccupation and obsession that the speaker has with his own mortality is plainly stated in lines 21-22 when the speaker says:

The speaker implores the sages to take away his fear and preoccupation with death in their holy fire.

The speaker manages to continue his exploration of achieving immortality, despite his increasingly frail body, by trying to enrich his mind and soul. The lack of a "singing school" indicates a lack of spiritual fulfilment for the speaker, and no community or guidance for him to learn from. The "singing" of his soul is likely a metaphor for the confidence and spiritual fulfilment that is so commonly associated with youth.

The speaker says that he will not age as long as he keeps his soul singing, but there is no place for him to learn how to do so, as it is such a personal and individual process. He goes to visit the ancient sages to plead for wisdom and clarity, he also wishes for them to take away his fear and purify his heart to make it an immortal and long-lasting thing. Despite all this, he believes he can overcome his mortality if only he can maintain the music of his soul.

Spirituality

William Butler Yeats was a poet who was also deeply spiritual in many ways. He participated in automatic writing and spiritual exploration in communication with spirits with his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees.

Yeats is recorded as having stated in his book The Vision that he believed that in early Byzantium, "aesthetics and practical life were one". The Vision itself is a collection of automatic writing that he and Hyde-Lees composed under the influence of spirits. 'Sailing to Byzantium' is clearly interested in spirituality, religion, and afterlife.

Fig. 2 - Mosaic of Christ located in Istanbul, the modern location of Byzantium.

Byzantium as the chosen location for the speaker's spiritual journey was a seat of power for the Christian religion, and the speaker's connection to making his soul "sing". As the soul is not something connected to the body in this poem, the distinction between the soul and the body is a spiritual leap. A majority of 'Sailing to Byzantium' takes place in the mind or soul, outside of the body, including the journey to the city and then pleading with the sages once in Byzantium.

Art

Art is another theme that plays a central role in 'Sailing to Byzantium'. Not only does the speaker spend the latter half of the poem speaking to sages represented in mosaics, the goal of the speaker is to make his soul sing, clap, and make music. The speaker aches to be a golden monument, mosaic, or piece of "artifice" decorating a lavish dwelling. He does not want to be stuck in his mortal body, but wants to be expansive as art is, and as long-lasting.

As art is something that preserves the past and extends into the future, it continues to "speak" to future generations, long after the artist has passed. The speaker wants to make a transition from his mortal body to artistic body to continue passing wisdom on to others, and maintain his own immortality in that way.

The poem itself is also very music-centric, with his iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme that is known to give poetry a lyrical or musical quality. This brings some lightness into an otherwise terrifying poem. Without the presence of the art in the poem, it would simply be a piece concentrated on existential dread, but with the added color, lightness, and philosophy that art brings to the poem, it uplifts the speaker a little bit and, by extension, the reader.

Symbols used in 'Sailing to Byzantium'

Yeats was a well-known symbolist poet and packed a lot into his work with a few short words. 'Sailing to Byzantium' certainly contains more symbols than the three listed here, but listed below are a few that are particularly crucial.

Byzantium

Byzantium itself is a symbol in the poem. There are quite a few cities that have existed over the course of human history that could have been used as a spiritual destination for the speaker, so why Byzantium?

The speaker desires to be as the sages are in the holy city of Byzantium but, more than that, Byzantium is used as a place of peace and higher contemplation. The speaker cannot find any human teachers to aid in breathing music into his soul, so he seeks out a traditionally Christian city, one full of long-lasting artistic works that depict all kinds of sages and wise people.

Yeats' poetry was known to reference Christianity as a peaceful force that provided salvation, and Byzantium holds that energy as well. The speaker goes to the city of Byzantium as a symbol of his own spiritual journey to inner-peace and sanctuary as he makes comes to terms with his mortality.

Golden art

The final stanza of 'Sailing to Byzantium' is very concerned with Grecian artifice, gold art in particular. In thepoem, we see both nature and artifice, nature being ephemeral and short-lived and artifice being a man-made higher contemplation of the self.

Within the difference between the short-lived natural self (the human body) and the desire for an immortal, gold-smithed body, lies the central obsession of the poem: what happens after death, and how can we become okay with the process leading up to it?

Fig. 3 - The goddess Justice rendered in a golden-hued statue.

The gold art in 'Sailing to Byzantium' symbolizes the 'unattainable' for the speaker, the deepest desire. He wants to have all the knowledge of the past, present, and future, immortalizing himself through becoming art, but also immortalizing himself through making art.

For a poet and artist such as Yeats, this can be a comforting thought – that we live on after death through pieces of poetry or art that we create while we're alive.

Holy fire

The holy fire in 'Sailing to Byzantium' symbolizes the cleansing and purifying nature in traditional Christian imagery. The speaker pleads with the sages in stanza three to cleanse his mortal body and heart through the use of holy fire and "gather [him] into the artifice of eternity" (lines 23-24).

This fire symbolizes the removal of the mortal unknowing and existential dread that comes with ageing, and, by extension, symbolizes the knowing and purifying certainty that would come with living eternally as the same immortal creature in the same immortal body.

'Sailing to Byzantium': Meaning

William Butler Yeats' poem 'Sailing to Byzantium' is an exploration into the psyche of an elderly speaker. In part, the poem is concerned with the difficulty that comes with mental and physical ageing. The poem is interested in a solution that comes with having a lively soul that is joyful and sings with certainty and knowing. In this way, the speaker claims, much of the frailty and fear can be avoided. As the speaker sets off on a spiritual journey to the ancient city of Byzantium, he begs for clarity and immortalization through artifice, and comes to the conclusion that once he sheds his mortal body, he will not come back as another natural or decaying body, rather he will know the past, present, and future, and be included in the artifice of immortality.

William Butler Yeats, The Tower 'Sailing to Byzantium', 1928.