Sailing to Byzantium
4 stanzas
| Verse | Harold Bloom (The Western Canon) | Helen Vendler (Our Secret Discipline) |
|---|---|---|
1 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. | Ireland—unnamed but unmistakable—is 'no country for old men' because it celebrates biological life (youth, sex, reproduction) while ignoring the life of the mind. 'Those dying generations' is the poem's key insight: every living thing is dying even as it sings. The ottava rima stanza is borrowed from Italian epic, giving the meditation aristocratic gravity. Yeats was sixty-one when he wrote this. | The stanza catalogs the sensual world with increasing scope: lovers, birds, fish—all 'dying generations.' The parenthetical '—Those dying generations—' interrupts the celebration of life with the fact of death. The rhyme of 'song/long' and 'neglect/intellect' sets up the poem's central opposition: nature's music vs. the monuments of mind. The ottava rima (ABABABCC) gives formal dignity to the argument. |
2 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. | The scarecrow image—'a tattered coat upon a stick'—is Yeats's most brutal self-portrait. But the remedy is defiant: the soul must sing louder as the body decays. Byzantium represents the triumph of art over nature: its mosaics are eternal where flesh is transient. The 'singing school' of the soul is the study of art's 'monuments of its own magnificence.' | 'Tattered coat upon a stick' reduces the aging body to its barest components—fabric and frame. The soul's response is not quiet acceptance but increasing volume: 'sing, and louder sing.' The logic is paradoxical: the more the body decays, the louder the soul must compensate. Byzantium is chosen for its fusion of spiritual and artistic perfection—the mosaics Yeats saw in Ravenna haunted him. |
3 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. 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. | The sages in the gold mosaic are both Byzantine saints and artistic forms—they exist simultaneously in religious and aesthetic realms. 'Perne in a gyre' means to spin in a spiral (from a bobbin or spool). The heart 'fastened to a dying animal' is the soul trapped in the aging body. 'The artifice of eternity' is Yeats's greatest paradox: eternity is achieved through art, which is by definition artificial. | The prayer to the mosaic sages is an appeal to art itself to save the artist. 'Perne in a gyre' uses a technical textile term (the spinning of thread on a bobbin) to describe spiritual descent. The heart is 'sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal'—the enjambment makes 'desire' hang in ambiguity before we learn it's desire trapped in mortality. 'Artifice of eternity' is the poem's keystone: art is both artificial and eternal. |
4 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. | The golden bird is Yeats's supreme symbol of the artist transformed: no longer natural but hammered into permanent form, singing eternally of all time—'past, or passing, or to come.' The mechanical bird that entertained the Byzantine court becomes a figure for poetry itself: artificial, beautiful, and freed from death. The final three-part phrase encompasses all of time in six words. | The desire to become a golden mechanical bird is both magnificent and slightly absurd—Yeats acknowledged this tension. The bird sings 'Of what is past, or passing, or to come,' covering all temporal modes in a single line. The hammered gold recalls the labor of artistic creation. The poem resolves its argument: if nature offers only death, art offers the only available eternity—beautiful, artificial, and singing forever. |