Sailing to Byzantium

Sailing to Byzantium-W.B.Yeats.

Summary.

The speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is “no country for old men”: it is full of youth and life, with the young lying in one another’s arms, birds singing in the trees, and fish swimming in the waters. There, “all summer long” the world rings with the “sensual music” that makes the young neglect the old, whom the speaker describes as “Monuments of unageing intellect.”

An old man, the speaker says, is a “paltry thing,” merely a tattered coat upon a stick, unless his soul can clap its hands and sing; and the only way for the soul to learn how to sing is to study “monuments of its own magnificence.” Therefore, the speaker has “sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” The speaker addresses the sages “standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall,” and asks them to be his soul’s “singing-masters.” He hopes they will consume his heart away, for his heart “knows not what it is” it is “sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal,” and the speaker wishes to be gathered “Into the artifice of eternity.”

The speaker says that once he has been taken out of the natural world, he will no longer take his “bodily form” from any “natural thing,” but rather will fashion himself as a singing bird made of hammered gold, such as Grecian goldsmiths make “To keep a drowsy Emperor awake,” or set upon a tree of gold “to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Or what is past, or passing, or to come.”

Reference-

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/yeats/section6.rhtml

Comments

Old Stone Mansion.

Old Stone Mansion – Mahesh Elkunchwar. Plot Overview- The play, Wada Chirebandi, begins on the fifth day after the demise of Tatyaji (Venkatesh) the patriarch of the Deshpande family of Dharangaon. Dharangaon is a small hamlet in the interiors of Maharashtra where the influences of commercial Bombay has slowly spread its tentacles. The play begins with Aai, the widow of Tatyaji, awaiting the arrival of her second son Sudhir and his wife Anjali from Bombay, to attend the 13th day rites. In the meantime, the eldest son Bhaskar and his wife, Vahini, has taken over the reins of the family by taking charge of the two objects of command, the keys and the ancestral jewellery box. Been a traditional Brahmin family, Bhaskar intends to conduct the rituals in full traditional fanfare even when the family has fallen in difficult lines. Bhaskar expects Sudhir to bear the expenses, as his image of someone from a big city is that of been financially well off, whil...

The Dance of the Eunuchs.

The Dance of the Eunuchs - Kamala Das. Summary- Included in the collection Summer in Calcutta(1965), 'Dance of the Eunuchs' is one of the most remarkable poems of Kamala Das. This is another autobiographical poem written in confessional style that symbolically portrays the poetess's personal melancholy in her own life. 'Dance of the Eunuchs' vividly conjures up the atmosphere of a hot, tortured, corrupt, sterile and barren world through vivid symbols and images. The dance of the eunuchs whose joyless life reflects the poet‘s fractured personality is a noticeable piece of autobiographical poetry. Kamala Das has vividly visualized the world of vacant ecstasy and sterility through numerous functional images and symbols in her poetry. In fact Eunuchs try to eke out a livelihood by dancing. Their dancing is mechanical and painful. The conditions and the climate are forbidding. The spectators are merciless. Even God seems to add their woes. The eunuchs...

The Mystic Drum.

The Mystic Drum - Gabriel Okara. About Poet. Gabriel Okara is a Nigerian poet and novelist Okara’s Poetry is based on a series of contrasts in which symbols are neatly balanced against each other. The need to reconcile the extremes of experience (life and death are common themes) preoccupies his verse, and a typical poem has a circular movement from everyday reality to a moment of joy and back to reality again. Summary. The drum in African poetry, generally stands for the spiritual pulse of traditional African life. The poet asserts that first, as the drum beat inside him, fishes danced in the rivers and men and women danced on the land to the rhythm of the drum. But standing behind the tree, there stood an outsider who smiled with an air of indifference at the richness of their culture. However, the drum still continued to beat rippling the air with quickened tempo compelling the dead to dance and sing with their shadows. The ancestral gl...

Hitaxi Dave

Search This Blog