Sailing to Byzantium
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,
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.
(6 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)
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February 26th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Analysis
In the first stanza, the poet is toying with the idea of a ‘new’ nation in which the old cannot prosper. He works on this idea saying “That is no country for old men“and later “An aged man is but a paltry thing”. In this second stanza, the subject of the poem reaches the monuments outside the city of Byzantium – a place where learning and the arts is of upmost importance, we also learn that the speaker is the aged man. In the fourth and final stanza, Yeats deals with the idea of afterlife and eternity that he ends the first stanza with. Despite the characters soul searching in Byzantium, the fate of his soul remains unclear. It is possible that the poem can refer to the creation of the new Irish free state.