Presented To: Ms. NighatPresented By: M HaseebM.A EnglishNUML Multan Campus

Sailing to ByzantiumBy William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

• William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland on June 13, 1865.

• He died in France on January 28, 1939.

• He wrote his poem “Sailing to Byzantium” in 1928.

• It is 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).

A portrait of WB Yeats by his father John B. Yeats done in

1900

Light Green: Republic of Ireland

Pink: Northern Ireland

Dark Green : County Sligo

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Breaking Down the Poem

• The structure of “Sailing” is sophisticated and concise. Its verse form is called “Otta Rima”.

• Otta Rima’s verse style is related to the fact that each stanza has eight lines.

• The Otta Rima’s rhyme scheme is “a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c”.

• The poem is styled in iambic pentameter where there is an accent on every second beat of the syllables used in that line.

A Byzantine Mosaic

Yeats and the Motifs of “Sailing to Byzantium”

• “Sailing to Byzantium” was published in 1928.

• Yeats was old and was afraid he was becoming temporal as his inevitable end approached him. Age and immortality play a big part in the poem.

• The world around Yeats was changing as the old world slipped into the new.

• The mysticism of Byzantium binds together Yeats interests in mysterious esotericism and the beauty of the distant orient.

Yeats in 1933 by Pirie MacDonald, six years before his

death

The First Two StanzasFirst Stanza

“That is no country for old men”—The poem opens boldly. The speaker in the poem makes a conclusive statement about the physical Eden the poem begins in.

The speaker states in the first line of the first stanza that this poem will be about old age.

Yeats contrasts an Eden-like vision of a bountiful place with visions of age and physical decay and death.

Second Stanza This stanza reflects specifically on

aging as the speaker compares an old man with a scarecrow.

The scarecrow is described as worn and tattered; but, by adding the word “unless”, the speaker seems to offer another choice other than this vagabond state. This choice being sailing to Byzantium.

The metaphysical singing of the soul is contrasted with the first stanza’s birds physically singing. This implies the immortal soul sings out inside the aging body.

The Last Two StanzasThird Stanza

The sages invoked in the first line of the stanza are mystics and masters of esoteric knowledge, knowledge that Yeats himself studied and tried to understand.

Fire has powerful symbolism in this stanza. The sages stand in the holy fire of God and the Speaker asks for his heart to be consumed in a sacrifice.

Age is also brought up again. The heart is “fastened to a dying animal” while the immortal soul begs for eternity.

Fourth Stanza The Speaker imagines escaping the

physical world and his aged body and becoming a jeweled bird made to amuse Byzantine emperors.

Yeats invokes many things over and over again in this poem. The physical singing of birds in the first stanza has become metaphysical as the speaker dreams of becoming the golden and jeweled bird.

By leaving the birds in the trees in the old world and becoming a bird himself in the next, the speaker creates a sense of unity in his quest for immortality and meaning.

Themes Transformation Old Age Man and the Nat

ural World Spirituality

Conclusion• In a world full of Modernism, he stuck closely to

traditional forms.• While contemporary poets like T. S. Eliot and

Ezra Pound were busy breaking down the entire history of poetic form, writing poems that jammed all sorts of forms together into a poem that started to work like a great big set of Tinker Toys, Yeats stuck to the classics.