Sailing to Byzantium( WB Yeats) Poem Explanation

About 'WB YEATS'

William Butler Yeats (1865-1928) an Irish poet, began as the leader of the Irish National Revival in the 1880s which used the subject matter from. the Celtic legends and referred to Byzantium, Greece and Italy as a means of evolving a glorious past. Yeats believed in the need of a system, a certain arrangement of beliefs that suggested and promoted a sense of the poet's unity. He felt that a poem should be a unified whole representing the integral unity of the poet. The world today is 'but a bundle of fragments and so the poet ought to create a fiction of unity and cohesiveness that would serve him in such a fragmented world because neither science nor bor church could do it. So Yeats made for himself a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition.

'Sailing to Byzantium' is the first poem in the volume called The Tower. The poem deals with war, old age, the Anglo-Irish inheritance, the decay of the present world and moves between contraries such as youth and age, life and death, change and changelessness and nature and art. Byzantium, the present Istanbul, was the capital of Eastern Christianty and was famous for the Platonic Academy until the fifteenth century. For Yeats, Byzantium represents eternity, a paradise free from the cause of growth and decay. The artist finds permanence in this place through his art and can remain free of the distortions caused by age and hard work. The young caught up in the natural cycle of birth, growth and death cannot belong to this place. Given the choice, Yeats would have preferred to sail back in time and space to sixth century Byzantium.

To Yeats, Byzantium symbolised European civilisation and spiritual philosophy and the journey to Byzantium, a search for spiritual life. The theme of the poem is very close to John Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' which concludes by saying 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty', Art and beauty created in the artifice is permanent as contrasted with the gradual decay and death of natural life. An artifice is a work of imagination, of undying intellect. Yeats would rather choose art over nature.

'Sailing to Byzantium' Poem

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.

III

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.

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.

Glossary

Line 1. That... country Ireland, the natural world

Line 4. salmon falls waterfalls full of salmon suggestive of spring time, strength and grace, of salmons leaping upstream to spawn

Line 4. mackerel greenish blue fish, shoals of them

Line 5. commend make pleasant and enjoyable, recommend

Line 7. caught attracted by

Line 9. paltry worthless, trifling, contemptible

Line 17. sages martyrs in the frieze at St Appolonaire Huovo at Ravenna

Line 19. holy fire live coal which cleared the unclean lips of the speaker, (Book of Isaiah (OT) Chap VI v.6.7)

Line 19. perne spool, a weaver's bobbin; Yeats uses it as a verb to indicate the winding or unwinding action, honey-buzzard- a kind of hawk

Line 19. gyre spiral

Explanatory Notes

Stanza I. Ireland, the poet feels, is a land for young, imaginative artists and not old men. The young are drawn into the creative cycle while the old continue their songs of youthful reminiscences. One of the central themes of the poem is the opposition between youth and old age. Yeats was preoccupied with the decay and loss due to old age. He was 63 when he wrote this poem. He resented the loss of youth and physical beauty. Everyone who is allured by the natural cycle of birth and death gets trapped within it and life's preoccupations make intellectual life seem relatively worthless in spite of the greater permanence of products of the spirit and of art The poet contrasts the merely sensual and the truly spiritual and Byzantium becomes a symbol of spiritual achievement while the poem becomes a journey towards true spiritual life. Every verse of the poem could be considered as one stage of the four-part journey

Stanza II. Yeats is grieved at the innumerable problems of old age which affect man's capacity to live life pleasurably and fruitfully Old age is as hollow as a scarecrow, with the physical appearance of a human being but lacking the human essence. One needs to look at old age as the liberation of the soul which actively experiences the beauty in the world around. Yeats is unhappy with the tendency of being content with what is around instead of trying to search for beauty beyond one's immediate range. Critical of such complacency, Yeats seeks fresh stimulus in sailing to Byzantium

Stanza III. Yeats refers to the sages in the frieze at St. Appolinaire at Ravenna and invokes them to spiral down the cone to him. Perne also means a kind of hawk and the image of a bird is like the descent by the sages. It is convincingly linked with the golden bird of the last stanza. In the world of art an image is as holy as a sage. God, the supreme artist and is the artificer of eternity and the holy fire, like the poet with his imagination which makes all artifices.

Stanza IV. Yeats seems to allude to Hans Anderson's tale 'The Emperor's Nightingale' in which reference is made to the Emperor's palace at Byzantium where there was a tree made of gold and silver and artificial birds that sang. Yeats may also have had in mind Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale'-'the self same song heard in ancient days by Emperor and Clown'. If reincarnated the poet would want to take his form from the artist's imagination so that he would defy the transitoriness of all natural things and their imminent decay. As an artifice he would be immortal and sing of what is past or passing or to come rather than follow the course taken by fish, flesh and fowl of birth and death.

Conclusion

"Sailing to Byzantium" by W.B. Yeats is a rich and complex poem that delves into themes of aging, mortality, and the quest for eternal truth through art. Through vivid imagery and symbolic language, Yeats contrasts the transient nature of physical life with the enduring power of spiritual and intellectual achievements. The poem's journey from the sensual world to the sacred realm of Byzantium reflects the poet's aspiration for immortality through art, making it a timeless meditation on the human condition and the transformative power of creativity.