Sailing to Byzantium

Yeats published "Sailing to Byzantium" in The Tower (1928), at a time when he himself was facing old age and illness, and four years after he had left his native Ireland on a trip to Italy to view...

The words "a tattered coat upon a stick" suggest a scarecrow. The coat is worn out, and it will become more tattered as it hangs in a field in all kinds of weather. The coat is hanging on a stick...

The diction Yeats uses in this poem is definitely elevated and reminiscent of courtly, literary, and religious speech. He uses series of three to give a sense of authority and all-encompassing...

In "Sailing to Byzantium," the theme of art is conveyed through the speaker's desire to be turned into a mechanical golden bird who can sing at the royal court of ancient Byzantium. The speaker...

Yeats depicts nature and the natural world in "Sailing to Byzantium" as representative of the temporal condition of all living things. For Yeats, the natural world is a reflection of the reality...

"Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem of old age. The elderly speaker feels his powers waning, his life force draining away, and so yearns to travel to a distant land for spiritual refreshment. This...

The "artifice of eternity" is the beautiful mechanical bird the speaker would like to become. In the phrase "artifice if eternity", the word "artifice" means an artificial mechanism. The speaker is...

In this poem the speaker expresses a powerful longing to retreat from modern life and the younger generation, among which, as an ageing man, he feels he has no place. He thus imagines a journey to...

The rhyme scheme of these four lines from "Sailing to Byzantium" is a simple ABCC, though the rhyme scheme of the whole stanza of which these four lines are part is ABABABCC. For the purpose of...

Yeats's visions of the holy city in "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Byzantium" clearly overlap, but the difference between them is that of anticipated ideal and magnificent but flawed reality. "Sailing...

When the speaker says he wishes to be "set upon a golden bough to sing," he is talking about his desire to be a mechanical bird. All through the poem, the elderly speaker has been lamenting his...

This brilliant poem has clearly a lot more to say than simply the narrow focus that some critics give it concerning the themes of aging. The appeal of the speaker is to the transformative power of...

The speaker is old and weary. He wishes to escape from the material world, in which he can no longer live a meaningful existence, and ascend to a higher, more spiritual plane. Byzantium represents...

The speaker, presumably Yeats himself, is regretting that he is too old to make love! He does not, by any means, disapprove of those who still can and do make love -- "The young in one another's...

William Butler Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium” begins with a lament. The speaker is an old man (as was Yeats when he wrote the poem), and he senses that his country no longer has a place for him....

I believe that this question might be asking about a central theme to the poem rather than a thesis; however, I will try to answer based on the poem having a supposed thesis. A thesis is an...

The emperor is a human being who is being contrasted to Yeats's vision of becoming an immortal golden bird, a mechanical work of art. Because the emperor is human, he will experience such human...

In the poem "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats describes the natural world as "no country for old men." It is a fertile place, full of birds and crowded with salmon and mackerel, but also a land where...

The speaker in this poem by W.B. Yeats is, we may infer from the opening line, an old man, concerned that, in his old age, he has become "but a paltry thing." He feels that to be old is to be...

Yeats wrote "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" in 1890 and "Sailing to Byzantium" in 1928. The dates are significant: the first poem represents a young man's desire to escape from the pressures of busy...

This poem is so complex that several approaches can be taken all tending toward adding additional understanding of the meaning of the poem. In other words, the more Answers, the merrier! Your...

In the poem "Sailing to Byzantium," decay is expressed through the mortality of humans. The speaker ponders the decaying and aging of human flesh compared to the ways in which one can figuratively...

Though it is of course a matter of interpretation, if you follow the general bent of the poem, it would appear that Byzantium is a place where age is not as important, where things are permanent...

Silverberg's award-winning novella is based on Yeats's poem of the same name and quotes from it. Both works share similarities: each evokes mystically beautiful and idealized places from another...

Reader response is a type of critical literary interpretation that ignores author intentions as unknown or even unknowable and emphasizes the "I" of the reader, without whom no literature can ever...

In William Butler Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium," the place of Byzantium holds the meaning of metaphorical immortality, intellectualism, and artistic pursuit. The speaker in the poem laments...

There are many symbols in this poem that you could choose, but the city of Byzantium itself is a good one. This city represents something magical in the poem. The poet travels there because he is...