An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing. Yeats wrote this at sixty, feeling his body's decay and dreaming of an art that transcends flesh. Byzantium becomes the symbol of eternal artistic form, the golden bird that sings of what is past, or passing, or to come. The ottava rima stanza moves with formal perfection while containing passionate rebellion against mortality. It is one of the great poems about aging, about art, about the desire to escape time through making something that lasts. The singing school is the study of monuments of its own magnificence.