Analysis of selling to byzantium

“Sailing to Byzantium” is a short poem of thirty-two lines divided into four numbered
stanzas. The title suggests an escape to a distant, imaginary land where the speaker
achieves mystical union with beautiful, eternal works of art.

“Byzantium” is a loaded word for William Butler Yeats, a word rich with meaning.
“Byzantium” refers to an earlier Yeats poem by that title and to the ancient name for
Istanbul, capital of the Byzantine empire of the fifth and sixth centuries. In his prose
work A Vision (1925), Yeats wrote that Byzantium represents for him a world of artistic
energy and timelessness, a place of highly developed intellectual and artistic cultures. It
represents a perfect union of aesthetic and spiritual energies; Yeats wrote, “I think that
in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious,
aesthetic, and practical life were one.” To historians of art, Byzantium is famous for its
multicolored mosaics inlaid with marble and gold. Often the mosaics depict Christ or
other religious figures in symmetrical arrangements with two-dimensional, impersonal
facial expressions.

The first stanza describes a country of “sensual music,” presumably Ireland, but
representing any place dominated by living for today. As an old man, the poet at once
celebrates the fertility and joyful images of teeming fish, birds, and people but despairs
of their temporal ignorance. Caught in the endless cycle of birth and death, these living
beings overlook certain “monuments of unageing intellect” that the poet seeks to
explore.

The old man reflects on himself in the second stanza, calling himself a scarecrow on a
stick without much physical vigor. What he lacks in body he compensates for in desire
to express himself through singing. Singing (his poetry) will allow him to transcend old
age. The spirit of his poetry will carry him to Byzantium, a magnificent and holy city.

The third stanza presents the speaker standing before a golden mosaic, pleading for the
Byzantine sages and “God’s holy fire” to illuminate his soul. He realizes that his heart is
trapped inside a fleshly creature that will soon die; the poet wants to leave this world
and enter the world of timeless art through his song—poetry.

The fourth stanza develops the contradiction that a human being cannot leave this world
while occupying a body. The poet desires to merge with the elaborate, gold-inlaid
Byzantine mosaics and become like a bird perched on a bough, serenading sleepy
emperors and nobles for all eternity. Preserved in this mythic form, the poet can
observe past, present, and future, rejoicing in his artistic immortality.