An aged man leaves the country of the young, where salmon crowd the falls and birds sing in the trees, and sails toward a golden city where the soul might be gathered into the artifice of eternity. Yeats composed this in 1926, at sixty-one, feeling the body's betrayal with an intensity that deepened his hunger for transcendence. Byzantium represents art's permanence against nature's gorgeous decay. The stanzas move from rejection of the sensual world to a prayer for transformation, the poet begging to be remade as a golden bird singing of what is past, or passing, or to come. The verse is formal, incantatory, hammered with the fire it invokes. It remains among the supreme meditations on ageing and the soul's refusal to accept mortality.