[In the following essay, O'Donnell considers “Sailing to Byzantium” as an attempt at escaping the decay of aging—the impermanence of mortal life—through a separate world of art.]

In “A Prayer for my Daughter” Yeats was concerned with physical threats from storm and warfare as well as cultural threats from the deterioration of traditional, aristocratic values. Those external threats continue to be an important concern in the poems that Yeats wrote in the mid-1920s, but his range of topics expanded to include old age and bodily decrepitude. The resulting collection of poems, The Tower, published in 1928, is his finest single volume, and it might also be the finest single book of poems published in the twentieth century.

Most of the poems in The Tower confront the problems of physical aging. “Sailing to Byzantium” seeks to evade the impermanence of the present world by escaping into a separate world of art. The poem articulates this theme by developing a set of interwoven contrasts between youth and age, physicality and spirituality, life and art, and mortal life and eternal existence. Because of the richly elaborated echoing and reechoing of contrasts the poem is at once vivid and subtle, emphatic and complex.

The opening stanza sets “old men” against “the young / In one another's arms.” This contrast of ages is emphasized both by the fecundity of the young and the inevitable demise that awaits “whatever is begotten, born, and dies.” The birds in the trees sing “sensual music” praising the natural process of procreation, birth, and death. But the old man who narrates the poem prefers “monuments of unageing intellect,” which the sensual youths “neglect.” “Sensual” opposes “intellect” and “begotten, born, and dies” opposes “unageing.” The opening phrase of the second stanza, “an aged man,” immediately contrasts with “unageing” in the previous line, and the “monuments of unageing intellect” are echoed in the “monuments” of the soul's magnificence.

Each of the four stanzas is interlaced by references to singing: first, the birds' “song,” then the soul that is to “sing” and seek a “singing school,” then the sages who are to be the soul's “singing-masters,” and finally the birds of “hammered gold and gold enamelling” which “sing / To the lords and ladies of Byzantium.” Yeats explained in a note to the poem that these golden “forms” are “artificial birds that sang.”¹ The natural birds in the first stanza sing in praise only of present life—“Whatever is begotten, born and dies.” But the song of the artificial bird on a golden bough in Byzantium encompasses all of the past, present and future: “Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” The artificial bird in Byzantium cares little whether something is dead or alive or not yet born.

The preference for artifice and for isolation from natural life can be seen in the simile that describes Byzantium's “sages standing in God's holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall.” Instead of describing the sages by comparing them to any natural thing, the sages are likened to a work of art—“As in the gold mosaic of a wall.” In “Sailing to Byzantium” an old man explains to those sages and to the reader that he left his former country and has come to Byzantium because art and the sages there are exempt from the mortality that besets every natural body.

In 1931 Yeats commented that the poem contains some of his thoughts about an old man's proper task, which is to prepare his soul for the body's death. He further explained that because “Byzantium was the centre of European civilisation and the source of its spiritual philosophy,” he had chosen to “symbolise the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.”² As described in A Vision (1925), Byzantium has special prominence as one of the rare points of balance at which “religious, aesthetic and practical life were one.” In Byzantium, during the sixth century and following, mystics who had sought supernatural visions and craftsmen who worked with physical materials shared the same culture.³ The only direct reference to Yeat's special theory of history appears in the phrase “perne in a gyre”—that is, to move in a spiraling motion around the surface of a cone. As noted in chapter 2, Yeats used a gyre or cone as an emblem of the increasing or decreasing strength of an historical era. But in this poem, as Yeats made clear in his comment linking Byzantium with the spiritual life, Byzantium is less important as a moment in the history of civilization than as a “holy city” where the old man will find “God's holy fire” to consume his mortal body and thus free his soul from “every tatter in its mortal dress.”

Another element in Byzantium's attraction for Yeats in A Vision, and one that might well account for the reference here to “the gold mosaic of a wall,” is the unusual combination of ascetic severity and material luxury found in Byzantine art. Its starkly artificial, highly stylized forms are executed with lavish, even dazzling use of gold and other colors. In A Vision Yeats admiringly noted the supremacy in Byzantium of ascetics who lived amidst “incredible splendour.” In the same passage, Yeats explicitly compares that physical magnificence to the beauty that can be seen only in mystical visions: “… An incredible splendour like that which we see pass under our closed eyelids as we lie between sleep and waking, no representation of a living world but the dream of a somnambulist … a supernatural splendour.”⁴ “Sailing to Byzantium” expresses that same duality of splendor and asceticism.

The old man in “Sailing to Byzantium” seeks an escape from mortality. He has left the country of “the young / In one another's arms” and he appeals for, but has not yet gained, entry “into the artifice of eternity.” He seeks the golden splendor of Byzantium, whose supernatural, permanent beauty will replace the fecund beauty enjoyed by the young in the country he has fled. Byzantium's splendid artifice is, however, a form of physical beauty rather than an immaterial, spiritual one. The existence described in the final stanza is an escape from mortality, but it is far closer to physical existence than to an exclusively spiritual existence. Its values remain overwhelmingly aesthetic rather than ascetic. The artificial bird, which sings “to keep a drowsy Emperor awake,” falls somewhat short of the expectations raised earlier in the poem by phrases such as “monuments of unageing intellect” and “monuments of its own magnificence.” But at least the artificial bird is less “paltry” than “an aged man” who is merely “a tattered coat upon a stick.” What matters most to the old man is that the artificial bird is not “a dying animal.”

Whether this particular escape from the ravages of time would win the reader's allegiance or would even win Yeat's allegiance is an open question. But there can be no doubt that “Sailing to Byzantium” succeeds brilliantly as a poem. Its considerable reputation is amply merited by inventive imagery, by masterfully interwoven phrases and by rhythmic suppleness within the regular, ten-syllable, eight-line stanzas, each of which is rhymed on only three words (abababcc).

Notes

1. (1927) Poems, p. 595.

2. Unpublished note that Yeats wrote for a radio broadcast but did not use, quoted by Stallworthy, Between the Lines, pp. 96-97.

3. A Vision (1925), p. 191; also in A Vision (1937), p. 279.

4. A Vision (1925), pp. 191-92; also in A Vision (1937), pp. 280-81.