In early Irish tradition there is a type of narrative known as imram, a sea voyage in which a hero or saint sails to the West to find the earthly paradise. Yeats adapts this notion in the next poem, except he abandons Ireland not for the West by for Byzantium and the East. Yeats admired sixth-century Byzantium for its wonderful artistry and had a fantasy of spending a month of antiquity there. It represented the ideal place for him as he raged against old age.

Sailing to Byzantium

 

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
Those dying generationsat 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 unaging 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.

Recording commissioned by the Poetry Archive, shared with kind permission of our reader.

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