Sailing to Byzantium by W. B. Yeats: poem analysis & meaning

Sailing to Byzantium the full poem, lines numbered

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

5Fish flesh or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten born and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

10A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

15And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

20And be the singing masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

25Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy emperor awake;

30Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

The poem in 60 seconds

Yeats was in his early sixties when he wrote this poem, and it opens with a complaint anyone who feels left behind will recognize: the world belongs to the young. His answer is not to grow young again but to leave nature altogether and become a work of art. Line 1 gave Cormac McCarthy the title of his novel No Country for Old Men. Watch the last line, where the golden bird sings about exactly what the speaker wanted to escape.

The speaker says that country is no place for old men. Young lovers, birds, salmon and mackerel, all dying generations, spend the summer praising whatever is conceived, born and dies, and they neglect monuments of unaging intellect. An aged man is a paltry thing, a tattered coat on a stick, unless his soul claps its hands and sings louder for every tear in its mortal clothing. The only school for that singing is studying the soul’s own great monuments, so he has sailed to the holy city of Byzantium. He calls on the sages who stand in God’s holy fire, as in a gold mosaic, to come out spinning in a spiral and teach his soul to sing. He asks them to burn away his heart, sick with desire and tied to a dying animal, and gather him into the artifice of eternity. Once out of nature, he will never again take a natural body. He will take a form of hammered gold, like those Greek goldsmiths make to keep a drowsy emperor awake, or be set on a golden bough to sing to the court of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Speaker & situation

SpeakerAn old man who has left his homeland, often identified with Yeats himself. He speaks as “I” and describes his own body as “a dying animal” (line 22).

Addressed toThe reader in stanzas 1 and 2. In stanza 3 he prays directly to the “sages” in God’s holy fire (line 17). Stanza 4 states what he hopes to become.

OccasionThe poem opens Yeats’s collection The Tower (1928) and is dated 1927 on the page. In a note at the end of the book, Yeats wrote that he had read somewhere of a tree made of gold and silver in the Emperor’s palace at Byzantium, with artificial birds that sang.

SettingTwo places. “That” country (line 1) is the land of the young and of nature, often read as Ireland, though the poem does not name it. Byzantium (line 16) is the ancient Greek city renamed Constantinople in 330, when it became the capital of what we call the Byzantine Empire; today it is Istanbul. The Byzantine city was famous for its gold mosaics and religious art.

ToneRueful and bitter in stanzas 1 and 2, fervent and pleading in stanza 3, calm and visionary in stanza 4, with an irony in the last line that readers still debate.

Form & sound

FormOttava rima; four stanzas of eight lines, each rhymed ABABABCC, so every stanza closes on a couplet.

MeterIambic pentameter, handled freely. Line 1, “That is no country for old men,” piles stresses at the end on “old men,” and line 16, “To the holy city of Byzantium,” stretches the rhythm to fit the city’s long name.

Rhyme schemeABABABCC, with many slant rhymes, such as young, song and long in stanza 1 or thing, sing and studying in stanza 2. Stanza 2 ends by rhyming come with Byzantium, and stanza 4 reverses the pair, Byzantium with come.

SoundStanza 1 crowds its images with alliteration and without commas: “Fish flesh or fowl” (line 5) and “begotten born and dies” (line 6). Stanza 4 says “gold” twice in line 28 and adds a “golden bough” in line 30, so the verse itself seems to harden into metal.

StructureStanzas 1 and 2 explain why he left and where he has come. Stanzas 3 and 4 turn to prayer and to the form he hopes to take: from the country of the body to the city of art.

Line by line what each part says and does

1

Lines 1–8

No country for old men

That country is no place for old men. Young lovers, birds, salmon and mackerel, all dying generations, spend the summer praising whatever is conceived, born and dies. Caught in that sensual music, they neglect monuments of unaging intellect.

How it worksThe natural world is lush and full of song, yet the speaker calls its creatures “dying generations.” The stanza sets the poem’s central opposition: bodies that breed and die against works of the mind that do not age.
2

Lines 9–16

A tattered coat upon a stick

An old man is a paltry thing, a scarecrow of a tattered coat on a stick, unless his soul claps its hands and sings louder for every tear in its mortal clothing. The only school for such singing is studying the soul’s own monuments, so he has sailed to the holy city of Byzantium.

How it worksThe scarecrow image is harsh self-mockery. The body is only clothing for the soul, and every rip in it is a reason for the soul to sing louder, which makes the journey a search for the right teachers.
3

Lines 17–24

Singing masters

He prays to the sages standing in God’s holy fire, like figures in a gold mosaic, to come out of the fire spinning in a spiral and be the singing masters of his soul. He asks them to burn away his heart, sick with desire and tied to a dying animal, and to gather him into the artifice of eternity.

How it worksThe prayer asks for purifying fire, not comfort. “Perne in a gyre” (line 19) means to spin in a spiral, an image Yeats also used in “The Second Coming,” and “artifice of eternity” (line 24) joins the man-made and the everlasting in one phrase.
4

Lines 25–32

The golden bird

Once out of nature, he will never again take a body from any natural thing. He will take a form like those Greek goldsmiths make of hammered gold and enamel, to keep a drowsy emperor awake, or be set on a golden bough to sing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past, or passing, or to come.

How it worksThe stanza never uses the word “bird,” but the golden bough, the singing and Yeats’s note about artificial birds make the form a golden bird, replacing the living birds of stanza 1. Yet its song is about time, so the ending loops back to the world he left.

The turn

Lines 17

Stanzas 1 and 2 explain and narrate: why the old man left and where he has arrived. At line 17 he turns to prayer, “O sages standing in God’s holy fire,” and the poem moves from describing his problem to asking to be changed. Stanza 4 then imagines the change complete.

Literary devices with line numbers

Metaphor

Line 10 calls an old man “A tattered coat upon a stick,” a scarecrow, and line 12 calls the body the soul’s “mortal dress.” Line 22 calls the body “a dying animal.” Each metaphor makes the body something the soul wears or is chained to, not what it is.

Apostrophe

Line 17 addresses the “sages standing in God’s holy fire,” figures who seem to step out of a mosaic. The direct prayer shows how urgently the speaker wants to be taught and changed.

Paradox

Line 24 asks to be gathered “Into the artifice of eternity.” An artifice is something made by human skill, while eternity is beyond time and making. The phrase captures the poem’s hope that art can outlast nature.

Alliteration

Line 5, “Fish flesh or fowl,” and line 6, “begotten born and dies,” run their words together without commas. The crowded sound imitates the rush of breeding and dying in the natural world.

Imagery

Lines 17–18 picture sages standing in fire “As in the gold mosaic of a wall,” and lines 27–30 describe hammered gold, gold enamel and a golden bough. The shift from living green and water in stanza 1 to fire and gold marks the move from nature to art.

Irony

The golden bird in line 32 sings “Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” Having escaped time, the speaker ends up singing about it, which echoes the “begotten born and dies” of line 6.

Themes in Sailing to Byzantium

Aging and the bodyArt and immortalitySoul against senseThe pull of time

Aging and the body

The old man feels useless in a world that praises youth (lines 1–8) and describes himself as a scarecrow (line 10) tied to a dying animal (line 22). The poem looks for dignity in age somewhere other than the body.

Art and immortality

The speaker wants to become a work of art, a golden bird that cannot age (lines 25–30). Art is the one thing in the poem that seems to escape the cycle of birth and death.

Soul against sense

Stanza 1 is full of “sensual music” (line 7), and stanza 3 asks for the heart to be burned away. The poem sets the life of the senses against the life of the soul and the intellect.

The pull of time

Even in eternity, the golden bird sings of past, present and future (line 32). The ending suggests that escaping time completely may be impossible, or that art masters time by making it its subject.

Images and symbols

Byzantium

The holy city stands for a world where art, religion and intellect are one, and where things made by skill last forever. It is a place of the soul more than a destination on a map.

The golden bird (lines 27–32)

An artificial bird that sings forever, the opposite of the living “birds in the trees” (line 2). It stands for the speaker’s hope of lasting as art, and, for some readers, for a gilded toy that entertains an emperor.

The holy fire and the gyre (lines 17–19)

The fire purifies, burning away desire. The gyre, a spiral, suggests the soul’s movement between worlds, an image Yeats returned to often.

Patterns

Singing. Birds are “at their song” (line 3), the soul must “sing, and louder sing” (line 11), there is a “singing school” (line 13), the sages become “singing masters” (line 20), and the golden bird is set “to sing” (line 30). Song moves from natural instinct to learned art.

Monuments. The young neglect “Monuments of unaging intellect” (line 8), and the soul studies “Monuments of its own magnificence” (line 14). The repeated word points to what lasts.

Tensions

Nature vs. art. The poem sets breeding, dying nature against permanent, man-made beauty. The speaker chooses art, but the last line shows art still singing about nature’s time.

Body vs. soul. The heart is “sick with desire” and “fastened to a dying animal” (lines 21–22). The speaker wants the soul freed from a body that still desires.

The ending

How Sailing to Byzantium ends, explained

In the last stanza the speaker imagines his wish granted. “Once out of nature,” he will never again take a body from any natural thing. He will be a golden bird, made by “Grecian goldsmiths,” either to keep a drowsy emperor awake or set on a golden bough to sing to the court. Yeats’s own note at the end of The Tower says he had read of a gold and silver tree in the Emperor’s palace at Byzantium with artificial birds that sang. The final line gives the bird its subject: “Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” Readers have long noticed the echo of line 6, where nature praises “Whatever is begotten born and dies.” Both lines move through three stages of time. One reading sees triumph: the golden bird no longer suffers time, so it can sing about all of it, past, present and future, like a prophet. Another reading sees irony. The speaker wanted to escape the cycle of birth and death, yet he ends as a court ornament singing about that very cycle, and his audience is a “drowsy” emperor and courtiers, not the eternal sages. The poem does not decide between these readings. Yeats returned to the city in a later poem, “Byzantium,” which suggests the question stayed open for him too.

“That is no country for old men.”

Line 1. The blunt opening sentence. “That” marks a place the speaker has already left, and the line later gave Cormac McCarthy the title of a novel.

“An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress,”

Lines 9–12. The scarecrow image of age, and the answer to it: the soul must sing louder for every rip in the body.

“sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is; and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.”

Lines 21–24. The heart is chained to a dying body, and the speaker asks to be made into something lasting, a paradox of made eternity.

“Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

Line 32. The last line. The golden bird sings of time itself, echoing the “begotten born and dies” of line 6.

Common misreadings

Myth“That is no country for old men” describes Byzantium.

Actually“That” country is the land the speaker has left, the world of young lovers, birds and fish (lines 1–6). Byzantium is where he has come instead (line 16).

MythThe speaker wants to be young again.

ActuallyHe does not ask for youth. He asks to leave nature entirely: “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing” (lines 25–26). He wants to become art.

MythThe poem is an account of a real voyage.

ActuallyThe voyage is imaginative. Byzantium stands for a world of lasting art and holiness, and the sailing is a journey of the soul in old age, not a travel record.

AP practice a poetry prompt in the exam's style

In “Sailing to Byzantium,” W. B. Yeats’s aging speaker leaves a world of youth and nature for a holy city of art. Read the poem carefully, then write an essay that analyzes how Yeats uses literary elements and techniques to convey a complex perspective on aging and the desire for permanence.

What a strong response notices

The contrast in lines 1–8 between the “dying generations” and the “Monuments of unaging intellect.”
The scarecrow metaphor of lines 9–12 and the soul that must “louder sing.”
The prayer to the sages in lines 17–24 and the paradox of “the artifice of eternity.”
The golden imagery of lines 27–30 set against the living nature of stanza 1.
The irony of line 32, where the golden bird sings of time, echoing line 6.

Practice prompt written by StoryBites, not taken from a College Board exam. See the AP Literature free-response guide for how answers are scored.

Test yourself

1. What does the speaker compare an old man to in line 10?

2. Where has the speaker sailed?

3. Whom does the speaker ask to be the singing masters of his soul?

4. What form does the speaker want to take once out of nature?

5. What is the stanza form of the poem?

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Answer

Explain it like I’m 12

An old man feels that the world belongs to young people and animals who are busy living and dying. He feels like a scarecrow, a stick wearing a torn coat. So he goes on a journey to Byzantium, an ancient holy city full of golden art. There he asks wise holy men to burn away his old, tired body. He wants to become a golden bird that sings forever. But the bird ends up singing about time, the very thing he wanted to escape.

Compare & connect

The Second Coming

W. B. Yeats

Both poems use Yeats’s image of the gyre, a turning spiral. “The Second Coming” looks at history spinning out of control; “Sailing to Byzantium” looks at one old man’s soul trying to escape time.

Ode to a Nightingale

John Keats

Keats’s speaker longs to fade away with a living bird whose song seems immortal. Yeats wants to become an artificial bird that truly cannot die.

Ulysses

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Another old man sets sail rather than wait for death. Ulysses seeks new experience in the world; Yeats’s speaker seeks to leave the natural world behind.

Discussion and essay prompts:

💬 Discussion questions

What is Sailing to Byzantium by W. B. Yeats about
What does That is no country for old men mean
What does Byzantium symbolize in Sailing to Byzantium
How does Sailing to Byzantium explore the theme of aging and the body?
How does Sailing to Byzantium explore the theme of art and immortality?
What is the central conflict in Sailing to Byzantium, and how does it shape the ending?

✎ Essay prompts

Analyze how W. B. Yeats develops the theme of aging and the body in Sailing to Byzantium. Support your argument with specific evidence from the text.
Examine the significance of byzantium in Sailing to Byzantium. What does it represent, and how does it deepen the work’s meaning?
How does W. B. Yeats use metaphor to shape the reader’s experience of Sailing to Byzantium?
Some readers assume that “That is no country for old men” describes Byzantium. Argue for or against this interpretation, using evidence from the text.

Key questions students ask

What is Sailing to Byzantium by W. B. Yeats about
What does That is no country for old men mean
What does Byzantium symbolize in Sailing to Byzantium
What is the golden bird in Sailing to Byzantium
What does perne in a gyre mean
Where does the title No Country for Old Men come from

Analysis is original StoryBites commentary. The poem is printed from the first edition of The Tower (London: Macmillan, 1928), checked line by line against the page images of that printing. It is in the public domain.