Sailing to Byzantium

The speaker begins by lamenting the hardship of life for an aging man who feels unappreciated and anachronistic living amidst the vitality of nature and its cycles of “sensual music” (Line 7). The narrator is at odds with this energetic and lush setting. He is “but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick” (Lines 9-10). His aging body is compared to tattered coat which clothes his “unageing intellect” (Line 8)—the throne of the eternal soul. These lines demonstrate how “Sailing to Byzantium” is in dialogue with other poems from The Tower. In "Among School Children," for example, the body is also disparaged as “[o]ld clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird,” which establishes an analogical relationship between scarecrows and human beings, implying that a defense of humanity could easily amount to a straw man argument since authentic living is dormant in the mind.

The speaker’s dismissive view of bodies directly coincides with images of sexual activity in nature’s reproductive processes: “Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long / Whatever is begotten, born, and dies” (Lines 5-6). Summer is a life-affirming season, during which the activities of animals—such as hunting and reproducing—reach their peak. The speaker resents the vitality of youth and is consequently sexually frustrated. He is an outsider looking in, observing acts of “commend[ing]” (Line 5)—a euphemism for sex or affirming life through nature, in which he cannot participate.

Music is wedged between distinctions like natural/unnatural, human/inhuman, rationality/emotion, and material/immaterial. The sound of birdsong is contrasted by the static image of “monuments” (Line 8), which indicates that music is a hindrance upon the speaker’s desire for metaphysical agelessness. The music of nature, like the birds performing it, is transient. The speaker journeys to the “holy city” (Line 16) to find a different kind of music to make his soul “clap its hands and sing” (Line 11), and refuses to distract from “[m]onuments of unageing intellect” (Line 8). In the second stanza, the narrator has arrived in Byzantium and seeks to justify his purpose in the holy city by proclaiming his devotion to metaphysical matters, despite the fact that physics and metaphysics are inseparable. If his body is but a “tattered coat upon a stick” (Line 10) a “mortal dress” (Line 12) then the soul must remain clothed by this fleshy chamber.

As the speaker grovels before the city’s golden mosaic, he prays for the sages to take hold of and eternalize his soul. The sages are reference to a pre-modern legend, in which the invasion of a church prompts priests to disappear into the walls, where they remain until Christianity is returned to their church. Conversely, the speaker desires to remain outside of space and time until the mundanity of nature is overcome.

In the final stanza, the speaker reiterates his disavowal of nature, but this time, understands his purpose. To fashion a timeless artwork is to allow that which is artificial and otherworldly to overtake one’s humanity. Alluding to the golden bird that Grecian goldsmiths are said to have created for emperors, the poem concludes with the image of a golden bird singing of human temporality as tripartite, evoking an irreconcilable tension between past, present, and future. This golden bird sits upon a golden bough—a reference to Virgil’s The Aeneid in which Aeneas offers Proserpina a golden bough in order to enter the underworld. While the speaker may aspire to immortality by way of artifice, even this avian symbol of eternity is at odds with itself, as it perches on an object offering admittance to hell: Art cannot be the guarantor of the magnificent monuments for which the speaker yearns. Nature will always prevail in the end, thus restarting the cycle, much like a gyre. However, with this knowledge of the duality of nature and artifice, human beings can take pride in the ways by which they dramatize this problem and dedicate their lives to finding a solution.