Poetry Sunday: Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

The book that I was reading last week referenced this poem and so I had to go back to the source and read it once again. I had first read it long, long ago in another lifetime in my English literature class. It didn't have a lot of meaning for me then; it was just words. These days it is a lot more relevant to me.

Yeats wrote it when he was around 60 years of age and he was, perhaps, beginning to feel some of the aches and pains of "old age." He was writing metaphorically about the spiritual journey of one seeking eternal life and the work of the imagination that is required to continue as a vital individual even when the heart is "fastened to a dying animal" (the physical body). He says that aging is "no country for old men," or as a modern philosopher has stated it, "Aging is not for pussies the fainthearted!"   

Sailing to Byzantium

by William Butler Yeats

I 

That is no country for old men. The young 

In 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 long 

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. 

Caught in that sensual music all neglect 

Monuments of unageing intellect. 

II 

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. 

III 

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. 

IV 

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.