Previous Next

The Indignities of Old Age

In the first two stanzas of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the speaker emphasizes his frustrations with his body and the indignity that comes with old age. He indicates his frustration already in the poem’s opening sentence, where he declares of his homeland: “That is no country for old men.” The speaker’s complaint relates in part to his native land’s tendency to romanticize youth and young love. 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. As a man of advancing age, the speaker is more concerned than his fellow citizens with the quasi-spiritual truth enshrined in art, and this fact contributes to his feelings of alienation. Of course, the speaker is also concerned with the agony of age. As he indicates in stanza, mortality is mortifying (lines 9–10):

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick

For the speaker, then, age is a matter of both spiritual and physical indignity.

The Spiritual Value of Art

In the context of the speaker’s journey of spiritual transformation, art has a special significance that he sees as being connected to the same eternal truths as those revealed by religion. The speaker initially suggests the spiritual value of art in the opening stanza, where he complains that people in his native land “neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect” (lines 7–8). Wrapped up in the everyday dealings of life, his culture fails to appreciate how works of art are “monuments” that enshrine immortal truths. That these truths are linked to religious truths becomes clear in stanza 3, where he prays to Christian priests from an earlier time. The speaker imagines these “sages standing in God’s holy fire” (line 17), an image the speaker likens to a “gold mosaic” (18). By envisioning the priests as if they were emblazoned in gold on a wall, the speaker produces an aesthetic representation of their divinity. And it is precisely this divinity that will allow them to “gather [the speaker] / Into the artifice of eternity” (lines 23–24). In this way, art provides the speaker with an imaginative bridge that allows him to access spiritual truth.

The Vitalizing Power of the Imagination

It’s crucial to recognize that the spiritual journey the speaker has embarked upon is a metaphorical one. This is clear from the fact that there is no literal way for the speaker to sail to Byzantium, since Byzantium is an ancient city that has long since ceased to exist. Founded in the seventh century BCE, Byzantium became Constantinople in 330 CE, and when the Ottomans took it in 1453 it came to be known as Istanbul. Aside from being a historical city, it’s also the case that the speaker’s vision conflates aspects of its ancient Greek origins as well as its Christian era prior to Ottoman rule. Clearly, then, the Byzantium of the poem is a product of the speaker’s imagination. But in a strong sense, that’s exactly the point. As the speaker nears the end of his mortal life, he longs for a form of transformation that can’t take place on the physical plane of the material world. It is therefore through the power of his imagination that he must seek spiritual revitalization. Hence his metaphorical journey to Byzantium, as well as his strange vision in the final stanza, where he speculates about being transformed into an artificial bird.

Previous section Setting Next section Motifs

Take a Study Break