Sailing to Byzantium

The poem explores the tension between mortal aging and the desire for eternal artistic and spiritual permanence. The aging speaker rejects the transient natural world of 'whatever is begotten, born, and dies' and seeks the timeless, artificed permanence symbolized by the Byzantine Empire.

'Sailing to Byzantium' was published in W.B. Yeats's 1928 collection 'The Tower.' This collection, written after Yeats received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, is widely regarded as one of the greatest single volumes of 20th-century poetry.

Yeats regarded the Byzantine Empire at the time of Emperor Justinian in the 6th century as an ideal civilization where religious, aesthetic, and practical life were unified. He described Byzantium in his autobiography as the source of the richest and most elegant culture the world has ever known, making it the perfect symbol for the eternal artistic permanence the poem seeks.

The poem consists of four stanzas of eight lines each, written in ottava rima, a traditional Italian verse form with an ABABABCC rhyme scheme. Yeats's use of this classical form, combined with the poem's dense symbolic imagery, contributes to its reputation as a masterwork of modernist poetry.