Analysis of Sailing to Byzantium
Darkness spreads over Middle Earth like a plague. The free peoples of the land have but one way to escape the evil that is driven to consume them. They must sail west, over the Sea, into the Havens. As this example from The Lord of the Rings illustrates, the option to sail to the West by the people of Middle Earth, namely the Elves, is what allows them to live forever. The Elves migrate west to gain a peaceful and immortal existence. William Butler Yeats speaks of a similar relocation to a place where he can live forever in his poem “Sailing to Byzantium”. In this work Yeats uses various literary techniques to express his desire to be freed from his failing and imperfect human form. The title “Sailing to Byzantium” refers to the imaginary journey the speaker longs to take to escape the juvenile and unappreciative inhabitants which populate the country he currently resides in. William Butler Yeats, himself, is most likely the speaker. The poem is written in iambic pentameter and has a rhyme scheme
of AB-AB-AB-CC, consistent through each stanza. Four stanzas, of eight lines each, comprise this poem. The first and second stanzas describe the country Yeats lives in before Byzantium and his deteriorating physical health. In the third stanza Yeats requests that his soul be removed from his body so his intelligence can live on. The fourth stanza is a description of what he will do once he is immortal. Now that Yeats has reached Byzantium, he realizes that his body is withering away. However, his soul and his intellect are in their prime. He feels as though his mortality limits him severely. The third stanza begins with an allusion to the three holy men “standing God’s holy fire”. With an apostrophe to the three sages, he begs them to take his undying spirit away from his mortal body, which he metaphorically describes as “a dying animal”. He wishes for the sages to bring him into perfection. “Once out of nature” and immortal, Yeats describes his life in Byzantium. He declares that he will no longer take his
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Approximate Word count = 695
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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