Sailing to Byzantium (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: William Butler Yeats
- First Published: 1928
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Twentieth century, Music or musicians, Art or artists, Spiritual life or spirituality, Singing or singers, Birds, Life and death, Ireland or Irish people, Old age or elderly people, Intellect, Fishes, Fertility
The Poem
“Sailing to Byzantium” is a short poem of thirty-two lines divided into four numbered stanzas. The title suggests an escape to a distant, imaginary land where the speaker achieves mystical union with beautiful, eternal works of art.
“Byzantium” is a loaded word for William Butler Yeats, a word rich with meaning. “Byzantium” refers to an earlier Yeats poem by that title and to the ancient name for Istanbul, capital of the Byzantine empire of the fifth and sixth centuries. In his prose work A Vision (1925), Yeats wrote that Byzantium represents...
[The entire page is 1550 words long]
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