The only concrete information we have about the speaker of “Sailing to Byzantium” is that he’s a male of advanced age—or, as he puts it in line 9, “an aged man.” The speaker’s age is more significant than his gender. In stanza 2, for instance, he cites his failing body—“a tattered coat upon a stick” (line 10)—as a primary motivation for leaving home and sailing for Byzantium. Aside from his own physical ailments, he also notes that the people of his native land are too devoted to the cult of youthfulness to pay any heed to the elderly. But it isn’t just youthfulness that obsesses the speaker’s home culture; it’s everything to do with life and its vital material processes. As he puts the matter in lines 4–6:

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Because his culture is “caught in that sensual music” of celebrating life’s vitality, people “neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect” (lines 7–8). In other words, his culture fails to appreciate the eternal truth that is manifested in works of art. The speaker’s frustration is therefore as much about his aging body as it is about a societal turn away from a belief in art’s importance.

If the first half of the poem outlines the speaker’s disappointment with his age and his culture, the second half shows how these disappointments orient his desire for spiritual transformation. Specifically, the speaker envisions the possibility of transcending the limits of his mortal form and becoming a work of art himself. In stanza 3, the speaker prays to the “sages” (line 17) of a bygone Christian church whom he sees as having been transformed into a “gold mosaic” (18). He likewise wishes to become a timeless work of art. Hence his request for these sages to strip him of his physical form and “gather me / Into the artifice of eternity” (lines 23–24). Similarly, in stanza 4, the speaker envisions taking on the artificial form of a mechanical bird that might sing in the emperor’s garden or perch on a golden tree bough. The visions of self-transformation articulated in the second half of the poem powerfully communicate the speaker’s desire to escape the strictures of mortal life. They also demonstrate his idealism as someone who believes in the capacity of art to transcend all temporal limits of “what is past, or passing, or to come” (line 32).

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