Sailing to Byzantium

“Sailing to Byzantium” consists of four, short vignettes rich with hazy descriptions of the speaker and his outlook on life as an aging man. The brevity of the stanzas requires readers to fill in the blanks, in alignment with the principles of Modernist Imagism. For instance, the very first line begins with the ambiguous word “that,” as the speaker gazes at a nameless countryside: “That is no country for old men” (Line 1). Youthfulness and vitality are implied through tokens or representations of the broader concepts. In other words, an image of the speaker’s subjective interpretation of the world is given through objective signifiers (fish, fowl, and the like). Like Ezra Pound’s definition of an “image” in “Imagism,” the poem “presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

While many of his contemporaries were embracing free verse, Yeats presented himself as a master of traditional poetic forms. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” he abides by ottava rima, an Italian form of composition consisting of eight lines of mostly iambic pentameter, with an abababcc rhyme scheme. The form emerged in late 13th century Italian religious verse, as well as troubadour songs. By the 17th century, English poets had adopted ottava rima for their own purposes. Byron notoriously made use of the form to evoke a mock-heroic sense of irony, while Shelley used it for more serious subject matter. Yeats’s decision to employ this rhyme scheme gives the poem an air of seriousness and grandiosity.

Slant rhymes connect words such as wall-soul-animal, furthering Yeats’s metaphysical thesis (nature bars humanity from the soul). The use of iambs, though inconsistent, makes the rhythm of the poem resemble that of an irregular heartbeat, such that the poem stands in for the human body pulsating in its desire for transcendence. Additionally, Yeats’s interest in occult numerology reveals that the poem was very intentionally divided into four parts, as the number four is traditionally related to corporeal matters. Ultimately, Yeats is dramatizing the alchemic process of turning the brazen into the golden, body to soul.