Keats, and in “Sailing to Byzantium” Yeats. They both have a theme of art verses nature

“Sailing to Byzantium” is about the speaker’s desire for transcendence of life.

The speaker is old “That is no country for old men.” (line 1) and feels as though he no

longer fits in the society of his country. He then says that old men lack in importance

“An aged man is but a paltry thing” (line 9), and that he is nothing more than a

scarecrow. He views himself at his old age as someone who no longer has beauty. So he

decides to sail to Byzantium, a place which is full of art and forever immortal. In lines

17-18, the "sages in God's holy fire, As in the gold mosaic of a wall," are eternal figures

for great meanings which existed in the past, but are now caught in frames of 'gold

mosiacs' on church walls. It shows that these intense symbols of beauty are somehow

still locked in the past, and unreachable by people today. This is why the speaker invokes

them in the next two line "Come from the holy fire

end of the poem in lines 30-32 “Or set upon a golden bough to sing, To lords and ladies

happen in the future “When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in

lost things to him he wants to regain. The last stanza talks about how he wants to become

Some topics in this essay:
Grecian Urn”, Byzantium” Yeats, , “sailing byzantium”, Urn” Keats, grecian urn”, “ode grecian urn”, lords ladies byzantium, holy fire, ladies byzantium, byzantium art, keats poem, art nature, lines 17-18, frozen mean, lords ladies,