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What is the rhyme scheme of these lines from Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium"?

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.

Quick answer:

The quoted lines from William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" scan as iambic pentameter, though they contain several metrical substitutions. The rhyme scheme is ABCC.

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The lines you refer to appear in the third stanza of Yeats's poem. All of "Sailing to Byzantium" is written in ottava rima, a meter of Italian origin that translates to the "eight-line rhyme" (notice that each of the four stanzas that comprise the poem is eight lines). Each line is written in iambic pentameter, though there are a few small breaks in the measured beats of this form.

The rhyme scheme emerges organically from the ottava rima. Here are the lines you're looking at; I've bolded the words we'll look at to determine the rhyme scheme:

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.

"Desire" does not rhyme with any of the following three end-rhymes. We'll assign it the letter "A" to represent its rhyme. "Animal" also does...

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not rhyme with any of the other end-rhymes. We'll assign it the letter "B." However, "me" and "eternity" rhyme with each other; we'll assign them both the letter C to represent that relationship. Thus, we've determined that these four lines follow the rhyme scheme ABCC.

If you look more broadly at the poem, each stanza follows the rhyme pattern ABABABCC. So, there are three alternate rhymes in each stanza, and each stanza ends with one double rhyme in its closing couplet.

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The rhyme scheme of "Sailing to Byzantium" is consistent throughout and the meter is predominantly iambic pentameter. The fact that there may be deviations from strict iambic pentameter is not unusual. Shakespeare did it frequently in his sonnets. It is the dominant meter that counts. Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is in iambic pentameter, but consider the line

Fast fading violets covered up in leaves.

The line not only does not scan as iambic pentameter, but it contains eleven syllables. It seems to be intentionally syncopated.

The rhyme scheme "Sailing to Byzantium" is the same in all four stanzas. Take the first stanza:

THAT is no country for old men. The youngIn 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 longWhatever is begotten, born, and dies.Caught in that sensual music all neglectMonuments of unageing intellect.
The first six lines are ABABAB, and there is a rhyming couplet in the last two lines, making the whole stanza ABABABCC.

young
trees
song
seas
long
dies
neglect
intellect

Half rhyme or slant rhyme, sometimes called near-rhyme or lazy rhyme, is a type of rhyme formed by words with similar but not identical sounds.
Wikipedia

Emily Dickinson was noted for using such half rhymes, or slant rhymes, or near-rhymes, or lazy rhymes in her poetry.

The second stanza of Yeats' poem would have to be represented as DEDEDEFF, since there are no words in the second stanza that rhyme with any of the last lines in the first.

Then the third stanza would be GHGHGHII, and the fourth stanza would be JKJKJKLL.

Altogether the rhyme scheme would be:

ABABABCC
DEDEDEFF
GHGHGHII
JKJKJKLL
Consume my heart away; sick with desireAnd fastened to a dying animalIt knows not what it is, and gather meInto the artifice of eternity.
There are many cases in which the rhymes are only approximate. In the above four lines "animal" is rhymed with "soul" which went before it. Yeats is obviously not terribly concerned about exact rhyming and neither is he concerned about strict adherence to the dominant iambic pentameter rhythm. The line "Into the artifice of eternity," for example, has an extra syllable and deviates from iambic meter. It would be hard to scan; it almost sounds like prose.

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Since rhyme scheme is developed primarily through end rhyme, there is no obvious pattern of rhyme in these lines as they are taken out of context from the poem. The end words (desire, animal, me, and artifice) do not rhyme to the ear perfectly or approximately, and they do not create strong sight rhymes, words that look as if they rhyme. Me and artifice might be considered a weak sight rhyme, since me and ending syllable -ce look as if they rhyme. If so, then the rhyme scheme would be ABCC, with the last two words rhyming by sight.

The meter, pattern of rhythm in the lines, is not perfect, but it is very regular. The first three lines are iambic pentameter, featuring the weak/strong rhythm with 5 iambic feet per line. (An iambic foot is a measure in the line consisting of two syllables arranged in the weak/strong pattern.) The last line is iambic trimeter, featuring 3 iambic feet in the line.

Here is how the lines scan. The strong beats are underlined, and the lines are divided into feet:

Consume / my heart / away; / sick with / desire
And fast /ened to / a dy / ing an / imal
It knows / not what / it is; / and gath / er me
Into / the ar / tifice

The iambic pattern is very regular. Only the fourth foot in the first line is not the iambic. The strong/weak pattern in this one foot is an example of the trochaic pattern of rhythm.

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