In the Library
Sailing to Byzantium
W.B. Yeats, 1928
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.
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About the book
That is no country for old men, the poem begins, and it means the whole teeming world: the young in one another's arms, the salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, everything that is born only to die. An aging man, his body a tattered coat upon a stick, can no longer bear to live inside that sensual music, so he sails the seas to the holy city of Byzantium, begging its sages to consume his heart away and gather him into the artifice of eternity. What Yeats wants is staggering and a little terrifying: to be taken out of nature altogether, to die out of the dying animal of the flesh and be reborn as a thing of hammered gold, a mechanical bird singing on a golden bough to keep a drowsy emperor awake. It is the oldest dream an artist has, made unbearably exact: to trade the warm body that perishes for the cold made thing that lasts, and to wonder, even then, whether it was worth the cost.