Yeats' Sailing To Byzantium (#poetry, #humblebrag... ;-)

 

Sailing to Byzantium

I

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds on the tree

--Those dying generations--at their song,

The salmon falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in the sensual music, all neglect

Monuments of unaging intellect.

 

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap his hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there any singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire,

As in a gold mosaic on a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre

And be the singing masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fasted to a dying animal

It knows not what it is, and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take 

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Out of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

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

-W. B. Yeats

Not exactly an unknown poem, but a good one. I've had it in my head lately because (here comes the humble brag part...) I'm now halfway through that 'monument of unaging intellect' Gibbon's Decline and Fall (1500 out of 3000 pages), which was going to be my summer reading project, but it's clear it will extend into the fall. The Roman empire has fallen in the west, Odoacer is the Gothic king of Italy and I will be sailing to Byzantium myself now. 

 

There are better (and shorter!) histories of the Roman empire these days, but one reads Gibbon now for the style and the wit. I've been collecting quotes, which will likely show up in a separate post someday.

 

 

Also: am I the only person who thinks that poem is meant (at least a little bit) to be funny? Sure, Cormac McCarthy stole the opening for his novel (which I haven't read) and then the Coen brothers made it into a movie, which wasn't particularly funny, but still.

 

I was poking around on the internets and it certainly seems like nobody does agree with me. But consider: studying those monuments of unaging intellect is useful for what? Keeping a drowsy emperor awake? Doesn't sound like Yeats is exactly praising study here. 'Perne in a gyre' feels to me like Yeats making fun of his own habits in diction. Gyre is a favorite of his (and one, I see, unknown to my spell-checker) which means a corkscrew motion, also used as a verb. The only other work I recall seeing it in is Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky', where it's usually taken as another one of Caroll's made-up words. And really, can anybody doubt Yeats thinks he would be happier sleeping with Maud Gonne (or Iseult) than being whacked into some sort of gold sculpture?

 

I kind of think there might be a clue to Yeats' approach. The eight-line stanza it's written in is ottava rima. According to Dr. Oliver Tearle (whoever he is) in this post, it's an 'an appropriately august form for the ancient and the timeless'. Well, no... The most famous English poem in ottava rima is Byron's Don Juan, certainly deeply ironic and occasionally uproarious. Byron uses the meter because its the meter of Orlando Furioso, one of the world's great mock-epics. (And also very funny.)

But, however you read it, it is a great poem.