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{{shortShort description|poemPoem by William Butler Yeats}}
{{for|the novella by Robert Silverberg|Sailing to Byzantium (novella)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=August 2020}}
{{Wikisource|The Tower (Yeats)/Sailing to Byzantium|Sailing to Byzantium}}
{{Quote box
|title=Sailing to Byzantium
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|quote=<poem>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.
 
"'''Sailing to Byzantium'''" is a poem by [[William Butler Yeats]], first published in his collection ''October Blast'', in 1927<ref>{{cite news |date= |title=Encyclopaedia Britannica |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sailing-to-Byzantium}}</ref> and then in the 1928 collection ''[[The Tower (bookpoetry collection)|The Tower]]''. It comprises four [[stanza]]s in [[ottava rima]], each made up of eight lines of [[iambic pentameter]]. It uses a journey to [[Byzantium]] ([[Constantinople]]) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and the human spirit may converge. Through the use of various poetic techniques, Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of [[Eternal life (Christianity)|eternal life]] as well as his conception of paradise.▼
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.
 
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.
 
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.</poem>}}
 
▲"'''Sailing to Byzantium'''" is a poem by [[William Butler Yeats]], first published in the 1928 collection ''[[The Tower (book)|The Tower]]''. It comprises four [[stanza]]s in [[ottava rima]], each made up of eight lines of [[iambic pentameter]]. It uses a journey to [[Byzantium]] ([[Constantinople]]) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and the human spirit may converge. Through the use of various poetic techniques, Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of [[Eternal life (Christianity)|eternal life]] as well as his conception of paradise.
 
==Synopsis==
Written in 1926 (when Yeats was 60 or 61), "Sailing to Byzantium" is Yeats' definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is "fastened to a dying animal" (the body). Yeats's solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city's famous gold mosaics could become the "singing-masters" of his soul. He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could exist in "the artifice of eternity." This is a reference to the legend that when the Turks entered the church ([[Hagia Sophia]]) in 1453, the priests who were singing Massthe Divine Liturgy took up theirthe sacred vessels and disappeared into the wall of the church, where they will stay and only come out when the church is returned to Christendom [(see Timothy Gregory, ''A History of Byzantium'', page 337]). In the final stanza of the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past ("what is past"), the present (that which is "passing"), and the future (that which is "to come").
 
[[The Golden Bough (mythology)|The Golden Bough (mythology)]] is a reference to the ''[[Aeneid]]'', book VI, by the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC), where it is offered as a gift by Trojan hero [[Aeneas]] to [[Proserpina]] to enter the gate of the underworld. Aeneas' father [[Anchises]] describes the spirit inside every body
 
<blockquote>The seeds of life—
Line 62 ⟶ 25:
shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep.
 
(''Aeneid'' VI:843-848) </blockquote>
 
This describes the tension between physicality and spirituality, mortality and immortality, which are the themes of this poem.
Line 74 ⟶ 37:
[[John Crowe Ransom]] comments: "The prayer is addressed to holy sages who dwell I know not where; it does not seem to matter where, for they seem qualified to receive the prayer, and it is a qualified and dignified prayer."<ref>Quoted in San Juan, Epifanio, ''Poetics: the imitation of action'' (Cranbury, N.J., Associated University Presses 1979) {{ISBN|0-8386-2273-9}} p. 57</ref>
 
[[E. San Juan Jr.|Epifanio San Juan]] writes that the action of the poem "occurs in the tension between memory and desire, knowledge and intuition, nature and history, subsumed within a vision of eternal order".<ref>San Juan, Epifanio, ''Poetics: the imitation of action'' (Cranbury, N.J., Associated University Presses 1979) {{ISBN|0-8386-2273-9}} p. 59</ref>
 
[[Cleanth Brooks]] asks whether, in this poem, Yeats chooses idealism or materialism and answers his own question, "Yeats chooses both and neither. One cannot know the world of being save through the world of becoming (though one must remember that the world of becoming is a meaningless flux aside from the world of being which it implies)".<ref>Cleanth Brooks, "Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium'", in Staton, Shirley F., ''Literary theories in praxis'', (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1987) {{ISBN|0-8122-1234-7}} p. 17</ref>
 
==Influence==
A second poem written by W. B. Yeats, "'''[[The Winding Stair and Other Poems|Byzantium''']]", extends and complements "Sailing to Byzantium". It blends descriptions of the medieval city in nighttime darkness with spiritual, supernatural and artistic imagery.
 
The short story "No Country for Old Men" by Irish author [[Seán Ó Faoláin]], about two veterans of the [[Irish War of Independence]] struggling to find their place in the Irish Republic of the 1950s, takes its title from the first line of the poem. His daughter, author [[Julia O'Faolain]], added her own twist when she titled her Booker-nominated 1980 novel ''No Country for Young Men''.
 
A science fiction [[Sailing to Byzantium (novella)|novella by the same name]] by [[Robert Silverberg]] was published in 1985. The story, like the poem, deals with immortality and includes quotations from the poem.
 
Canadian author [[Guy Gavriel Kay]]'s historical fantasy duologytwo-part series ''[[The Sarantine Mosaic]]'' was inspired by this poem.<ref>Dena Taylor, On Sailing to Sarantium, TransVersions 10, Toronto: Orchid Press, 1999, republished on Bright Weavings (Kay's authorized website) Archived 15 February 2010 at the Wayback Machine</ref>▼
[[Philip Roth]]'s 2001 short novel [[The Dying Animal]] takes its title from the third stanza, and is explicitly referenced in the text.<ref>"Transnational Trauma and "the mockery of Armageddon": "The Dying Animal" in the New Millennium," AIMEE POZORSKI, <i>Studies in American Jewish Literature</i> Vol. 23 Philip Roth's America: The Later Novels (2004), pp. 122-134. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41206011</ref>▼
 
▲The poem is referenced extensively in [[Philip Roth]]'s 2001 short novel ''[[The Dying Animal]]'', which also takes its title from the third stanza, and is explicitly referenced in the textpoem.<ref>"Transnational Trauma and "the mockery of Armageddon": "The Dying Animal" in the New Millennium," AIMEE POZORSKI, <i>''Studies in American Jewish Literature</i>'' Vol. 23 Philip Roth's America: The Later Novels (2004), pp. 122-134. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41206011</ref>
▲Canadian author [[Guy Gavriel Kay]]'s historical fantasy duology [[The Sarantine Mosaic]] was inspired by this poem.<ref>Dena Taylor, On Sailing to Sarantium, TransVersions 10, Toronto: Orchid Press, 1999, republished on Bright Weavings (Kay's authorized website) Archived 15 February 2010 at the Wayback Machine</ref>
 
A phrase in the opening line of the poem, "no country for old men," has been adopted as the title for many literary works, most notably as the novel ''[[No Country for Old Men (novel)|No Country for Old Men]]'' by [[Cormac McCarthy]]''<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Frye |first=S. |year=2006 |title=Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium' and McCarthy's ''No Country for Old Men'': Art and Artifice in the New Novel |journal=The Cormac McCarthy Society Journal |volume=5}}</ref>'' and [[No Country for Old Men|its film adaptation]], as well as the short story "No Country for Old Men" by [[Seán Ó Faoláin]], the novel ''No Country for Young Men'' by [[Julia O'Faolain]], and the novel ''No Country for Old Men'' by Alan Schwartz.
A song on [[Lisa Gerrard]] and [[Patrick Cassidy (composer)|Patrick Cassidy]]'s 2004 album ''[[Immortal Memory]]'' was named after the poem.
 
The title of the poem itself has also been adopted as the title of [[Sailing to Byzantium (novella)|a novella]] by [[Robert Silverberg]], an unpublished novel by film director [[Michael Cimino]],<ref>{{cite book |last=Elton |first=Charles |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DESPzgEACAAJ |title=Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision |publisher=Abrams Press |year=2022 |isbn=9781419747113 |pages=255–256}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine |last=Archerd |first=Army |date=June 4, 1997 |title=Perry making new friends in rehab |url=https://variety.com/1997/voices/columns/perry-making-new-friends-in-rehab-1117863081/amp/ |access-date=August 8, 2023 |magazine=[[Variety (magazine)|Variety]]}}</ref> and a song by [[Lisa Gerrard]] and [[Patrick Cassidy (composer)|Patrick Cassidy]] on the album ''[[Immortal Memory]].''
The title of the 2005 novel ''[[No Country For Old Men]]'' by [[Cormac McCarthy]] and the 2007 Oscar winning film adapted from it, comes from the first line of this poem.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Frye|first = S.|title=Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium' and McCarthy's ''No Country for Old Men'': Art and Artifice in the New Novel|journal=The Cormac McCarthy Society Journal |volume=5 |year=2006 }}</ref>
 
==Notes==
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==References==
* [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43291/sailing-to-byzantium "Sailing to Byzantium"] ''Poetry Foundation''. {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220614035247/https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43291/sailing-to-byzantium |date=14 June 2022 }}
* [http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1575/ ''Sailing to Byzantium.''] Poetry Archives
* [http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/734_11.html "Sailing to Byzantium"]. ''The Britannica Guide to the Nobel Prizes''. 1997. 30 April 2006. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20020622035244/http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/734_11.html |date=22 June 2002 }}
 
==External links==
* {{StandardEbooks|Standard Ebooks URL=https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/w-b-yeats/poetry|name=The collected public domain poetry of Yeats as an eBook|noitalics=true}}
*[http://www.nli.ie/yeats/ Watch 'Sailing to Byzantium' master class video (National Library of Ireland)] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070203220551/http://www.nli.ie/yeats/ |date=3 February 2007 }}
 
{{W. B. Yeats}}
{{Authority control}}
 
[[Category:19281926 poems]]
[[Category:Poetry by W. B. Yeats]]
[[Category:Byzantine Empire in art and culture]]
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