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“Sailing to Byzantium” has a tone that’s best characterized as restless. This tone is appropriate for a poem that centers an aging speaker whose spiritual journey is motivated by his frustration with the existing world and its obsession with youthful vitality. However, though the speaker is clearly a bit restless and has a strong feeling of spiritual wanderlust, the poem’s restless tone arises more from tensions that play out on a formal level. To begin, consider that Yeats wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” according to the strict constraint of ottava rima, which requires eight-line stanzas with a precise rhyme scheme: ABABABCC. Although each of the poem’s four stanzas does follow this scheme, the frequent use of slant rhyme also suggests a subtle resistance to the formal restriction. A similar tension occurs on the level of meter. Though Yeats composed the poem in relatively regular iambic pentameter, he also makes liberal use of caesura and enjambment to modulate the verse into more complex rhythms. In other words, Yeats puts pressure on the formal devices that structure the poem, creating a tense feeling of restlessness that connects to the speaker’s desire to leave home and sail to Byzantium.

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