Today’s Poem: Sailing to Byzantium

Art and eternity

John II Komnenos and Irene of Hungary with Mary and Jesus, mosaic at the Hagia Sophia, c. 1118 (Wikimedia Commons)

---

---

Sailing to Byzantium

by William Butler Yeats

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.

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,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

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,                       ◦ to perne = to spin, like 
And be the singing-masters of my soul.                                 a mechanical spool
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.

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;
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” is a difficult poem, but it illustrates one of the many talents of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) — an ability to make a difficult poem flow as though it weren’t difficult. As though it were a simple narrative. As though it were a river moving sedately within its banks.

Yeats does not always write this way. “Byzantium” — a 1933 companion to Today’s Poem, the 1926 “Sailing to Byzantium” — is notoriously hard to parse, as are any of his poems that rely deeply on the strange cosmology of A Vision, Yeats’s 1925 mystical merging of astrology and history.

But think of “The Second Coming” (featured here at Poems Ancient and Modern this past winter) or, even more, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (featured this spring). There is gloss of intelligibility on them, a smooth narrative that lures us to follow along, like the placid surface of a river, though strange and dangerous undercurrents exist just beneath view. And “Sailing to Byzantium” is another such poem: The deeper one dives, the denser and more opaque the water grows.

Back in 1977, Denis Donoghue took out after Yeats, calling him a poet with a few wonderful poems, certainly, but a man who chose to live well rather than truly pursue his art — part of a small critical attempt to reject Yeats in those days as a great poet. It mostly faded away, but the existence of that countercurrent means I should not hide that I hold Yeats the greatest English poet of the past century and a half. Like Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) in German, Yeats began as a late Romantic poet. He was, in fact, a highly successful one, which makes his even more successful turn to modernism an astonishing achievement.

By his sixties, Yeats was much concerned with growing old, and several of his poems in the late 1920s and early 1930s take up the loss of vigor and bodily attractiveness. The 1928 “Among School Children,” for a famous example. Or Today’s Poem, “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Written in four ottava rima stanzas — pentameter lines rhymed abababcc — “Sailing to Byzantium” opens with its famous description of “no country for old men.” (Notice in the first line the chiasmus of assonance, the crisscross of vowel sounds, that Yeats does so well: “That is no country for old men. The young,” with the o sound of no and old interlaced with the u sound of country and young.) The young in one another’s arms, the birds, the fish — all are caught in the sensual music of blooming life. Something curious, however, is suggested by mentioning that “Those dying generations” all “neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.”

So, too, in the second stanza. We get one of Yeats’s scarecrow descriptions of old men, in contrast to the vigor of those living in the “summer” world. But we’re then told that the soul has no “singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence.” And this, we’re told in the poem’s major turn at the end of the second stanza, is the cause of the old man’s flight to another — and mythologized — country (just as the lake isle of Innisfree was): “And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.”

Pirie MacDonald’s photograph of Yeats in 1932 (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s in the third stanza that we get the vision of a mythologized medieval Byzantium. Calling on the “sages standing in God’s holy fire,” seeing the beauty of the “gold mosaic of a wall” (presumably in the Hagia Sophia), Yeats prays to find “the singing-masters of my soul” — who will “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal.” What that singing entails is finally made clear: The monuments of unageing intellect and the soul’s own magnificence come from “the artifice of eternity.”

This is the great call to art. There is a hint in the final lines that the artist and the prophet are one, singing “To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” And perhaps that’s right, for both have left the dying summer realm of ordinary sensual life. But the focus of the fourth stanza is the shape of life as an artist: a mechanical bird on a golden bough that has taken the eternal embodiment of poetry.

---

---