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In writing “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats adopted a traditional rhyme scheme known as ottava rima. First used by the fourteenth-century Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio, ottava rima consists of an eight-line rhyming pattern that consists of six alternating rhymes followed by a closing couplet. This pattern can be schematized as follows: ABABABCC. Although sometimes chosen for works written in a mock-heroic vein, ottava rima has long been used in the composition of long narrative poems with heroic themes. This history makes Yeats’s use of ottava rima a surprising choice for “Sailing to Byzantium,” a short poem that, aside from containing only weak narrative elements, isn’t especially heroic. That said, the use of ottava rima provides a strong sense of formal symmetry across the poem’s four stanzas. From this perspective, Yeats’s rhyme scheme gives the poem a degree of artifice that mirrors the speaker’s desire to enter “the artifice of eternity” (line 24).

As for the rhymes themselves, the poem features a large amount of slant rhyme. The term slant rhyme refers to instances where words form rhyme pairings that, though close in sound, are nonetheless inexact. Slant rhyme appears frequently in the A and B rhymes of each stanza. In stanza 1, for instance, the A rhymes feature an inexact pairing of “young” (line 1) with “song” and “long” (3, and 5). The B rhymes similarly pair “dies” (line 6) with “trees” and “seas” (2 and 4). Whereas these examples all consist of single-syllable words, the rhymes in other stanzas feature polysyllabic words. In stanza 2, for instance, B rhymes include “unless” and “dress” (lines 10 and 12), which form another slant rhyme with “magnificence” (14). Significantly, in contrast to the imperfections visible in the A and B rhymes, the couplets that close each stanza are all exact matches. Though the C rhymes do often occur between monosyllabic and polysyllabic words (e.g., “come” and “Byzantium” [lines 15 and 16]), they still form exact rhymes. The shift from the imperfect A and B rhymes to the perfect C rhymes mirrors the speaker’s desire to pass from the imperfections of the aging body to the immortal perfection of art.

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