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-
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