William Butler Yeats wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” in September 1926, when he was 61 years old. Like Yeats himself, the anonymous speaker of the poem is a man of advancing age who feels increasingly alienated from the everyday concerns of the world. The speaker feels particularly frustrated by his experience living in a culture that is so focused on passing pleasures that the people no longer concern themselves with more enduring wisdom. All too aware of his own mortality, the speaker seeks a personal transformation that would connect him to the kinds of spiritual truths he sees existing in religion and, especially, in art. It is for this reason that the speaker sails to Byzantium, that ancient city where, as Yeats himself once wrote, “never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one.” This unity of spiritual and aesthetic truth will, the speaker hopes, enable him to enter what he calls “the artifice of eternity” (line 24). For a work that ponders the eternal nature of aesthetic forms, it’s appropriate that the poem is very tightly structured. “Sailing for Byzantium” consists of four metrically regular eight-line stanzas, each of which follows a strict Italian rhyme scheme known as ottava rima.

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