Sailing to Byzantium: Key Poetic Devices

Allusion

Perhaps the most significant poetic device Yeats employs in “Sailing to Byzantium” is allusion. An allusion (uh-LOO-zhun) is a passing reference to a literary or historical person, place, or event, often made without explicit identification. The key references in the poem appear in stanza 3, which opens with the speaker making the following address (lines 17–18):

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall

The “sages” referenced here allude to the Christian priests who presided over the Hagia Sophia prior to its conversion into an Islamic mosque. According to legend, when the Ottomans invaded Constantinople in 1453, the priests sang the Divine Liturgy as they disappeared into the church walls. They planned to reside there, invisible, until the return of Christendom. Here, the speaker uses a simile to make these invisible sages visible. No longer hidden inside the walls, they appear “in the gold mosaic of a wall.” Here, Yeats is making a second allusion, this time to the mosaic of the holy martyrs in the Basilica di Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy, which he had visited in 1907. (Incidentally, this Italian connection may have inspired Yeats’s use of ottava rima for the poem’s rhyme scheme.)

In addition to these historical and architectural allusions, Yeats also makes two important literary references in the poem. Both of these references appear in the final stanza, where the speaker pledges never again to take the form of “any natural thing” (line 26). Instead of taking an organic bodily form, he envisions being transformed into an artificial bird. The speaker first mentions this possibility in lines 27–29, where he describes taking

such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake[.]

These lines refer to “The Nightingale,” a fairy tale by Han Christian Andersen that features an artificial nightingale in the gardens of the emperor of China. Here, Yeats links Andersen’s tale to a similar story about how the emperor’s palace garden in Byzantium had artificial birds. The speaker makes another allusion in lines 30–32, where he imagines his future bird self perching on a golden bough:

Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come

The phrase “a golden bough” alludes to an episode in the Aeneid, by the Roman poet Virgil. In this episode, the hero Aeneas must present a golden tree branch to the goddess of the underworld to gain access to the land of the dead. This allusion links to the speaker’s desire to pass from his physical existence to the undying artifice of art.

Apostrophe

Apostrophe (uh-PAW-struh-fee) is a rhetorical device that occurs whenever a speaker directly addresses an absent person, or else an object or abstract entity. Yeats uses the technique of apostrophe in stanza 3, where the speaker directly addresses a group of priests (lines 17–20):

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,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.

As mentioned above, in the entry on allusion, this passage references a legend about the Hagia Sophia, the architectural jewel of Constantinople (formerly Byzantium). For the first millennium of its existence, the Hagia Sophia was a Christian church, but when the Ottomans took over in 1453, it was converted into a Muslim mosque. Legend has it that when the enemy forces invaded the city, the priests of the Hagia Sophia sang the Divine Liturgy and disappeared into the church walls to await the return of Christendom. Here, the speaker imagines that these “sages” were able to transcend their physical existence and become like a “gold mosaic” on the church wall. The speaker longs to undergo a similar transformation. As such, he appeals directly to these holy priests that they might serve as “the singing-masters” of his soul.

Caesura and Enjambment

Throughout “Sailing to Byzantium” Yeats uses a combination of these two techniques to manipulate the overall pace and rhythm of the language. The term caesura (say-ZHOO-rah) refers to a strong pause that occurs in the middle of a poetic line. Meanwhile, enjambment (en-JAM-ment) occurs whenever one line flows continuously into the next without stopping. Used together, these techniques allow Yeats to modulate the cadences of the verse in subtle yet powerful ways. Perhaps the most effective balancing of caesura and enjambment occurs in poem’s opening stanza (lines 1–8):

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,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

From the very beginning, Yeats surprises the reader by placing the poem’s first full stop before the end of the first line. This choice creates an effect where the opening line seems to end prematurely. Yeats amplifies this effect through his modulation of the line’s meter. The opening phrase is very irregular: “That is / no coun- / try for / old men.” Only in the final foot does the poem’s iambic rhythm begin, and it carries over without a break into the next line: “The young // In one / an-oth- / er's arms, / birds in / the trees.” This powerful instance of caesura and enjambment echoes the speaker’s sense that the time for “old men” is over and that the world belongs henceforth to “the young.” In the lines that follow, Yeats continues to punctuate each line with numerous pauses, the varying lengths of which are suggested by the mix of commas and long dashes. Situating these pauses in relation to the enjambment of lines 5 and 7, Yeats achieves uniquely measured cadences that show his maturity as a poet.

Extended Metaphor

An extended metaphor functions in the same way as an ordinary metaphor, but it differs in the amount of space devoted to its development. Whereas an ordinary metaphor may be mentioned in passing, an extended metaphor unfolds over the course of many lines. In this poem, Yeats uses an imaginary journey to the ancient Greek city of Byzantium as an extended metaphor for a spiritual journey. The speaker sets the groundwork for this metaphor in the first two stanzas, where they describe their growing sense of alienation. In a world that fetishizes youth, life is intolerable for the elderly. It is, as the aging speaker puts it in the opening line, “no country for old men.” No longer content in a world that’s preoccupied only with “monuments of its own magnificence” (line 14), the speaker has chosen to depart for “the holy city of Byzantium” (16). Yet this journey is figurative rather than literal, and it represents the speaker’s desire for spiritual fulfillment, which he describes as a mode of transcendence “into the artifice of eternity” (line 24). Thus, the journey to Byzantium stands as a metaphor for a passage from the depredations of life to the immortality of art.

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