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Sailing to Byzantium

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Originally published
  
1928

Author
  
Robert Silverberg

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Similar
  
W B Yeats books, Other books

"Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928 collection The Tower. It comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight ten-syllable lines. It uses a journey to Constantinople (Byzantium) as a metaphor for a spiritual 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's "Sailing to Byzantium" describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of eternal life as well as his conception of paradise.

Contents

Synopsis

Written in 1926 (when Yeats was 60 or 61), "Sailing to Byzantium" is Yeats' definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is "fastened to a dying animal" (the body). Yeats's solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city's famous gold mosaics could become the "singing-masters" of his soul. He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could exist in "the artifice of eternity." In the final stanza of the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past ("what is past"), the present (that which is "passing"), and the future (that which is "to come").

Interpretation

Yeats wrote in a draft script for a 1931 BBC broadcast:

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'. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jeweled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.

John Crowe Ransom comments: "The prayer is addressed to holy sages who dwell I know not where; it does not seem to matter where, for they seem qualified to receive the prayer, and it is a qualified and dignified prayer."

Epifanio San Juan writes that the action of the poem "occurs in the tension between memory and desire, knowledge and intuition, nature and history, subsumed within a vision of eternal order".

Cleanth Brooks asks whether, in this poem, Yeats chooses idealism or materialism and answers his own question, "Yeats chooses both and neither. One cannot know the world of being save through the world of becoming (though one must remember that the world of becoming is a meaningless flux aside from the world of being which it implies)".

  • Some readers and reviewers assume that the title of Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal is derived from the third stanza of the poem.
  • The title of No Country for Old Men by American author Cormac McCarthy and its subsequent film adaptation by the same name is derived from the first line of the poem.
  • The title of "The Young in One Another's Arms" by Canadian author Jane Rule is a quotation from the poem.
  • The title of Sailing to Sarantium by Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay is inspired by the title of the poem.
  • Robert Silverberg wrote a science fiction novella titled Sailing to Byzantium; it won a Nebula award in 1986.
  • Robert Silverberg wrote a science fiction novel entitled "Up the Line" (1969) in which our hero, a Time Courier, is about to take Time Tourists back to Byzantium. During the farewell party a guest shouts "that is no country for old men".
  • In the BBC documentary series The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski cites the 'monuments of unageing intellect' as a primary focus for his series of essays.
  • Lisa Gerrard has a track entitled Sailing to Byzantium on her album Immortal Memory.
  • J. M. Coetzee focuses his book Disgrace around the story of an aged scholar suffering with questions of his own mortality and quotes the poem directly in the work.
  • In the William Kennedy novel Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (the second of his cycle of novels set in Albany, New York; many of its characters are Irish Americans), Albany Times Union columnist Martin Daugherty recalls something his playwright father said to him while they walked through Washington Park "an age ago": "This is no country for old men, his father said. I prefer, said Edward Daugherty, to be with the poet, a golden bird on a golden bough, singing of what is past."

    • References

    Sailing to Byzantium Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA