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Sailing to Byzantium
FORM AND
STRUCTURE

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OttavaRima

CONTEXT

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On Sailing to Byzantium Yeats said ‘I am trying to write about the state of my
soul’
Poem was publish in the book ‘The Tower’
Yeats wrote this when he was around 60 years old in 1926, he was revered +
famous by then, idea of man taking stock of himself/reflecting

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THEMES

QUOTES
AND
ANALYSIS

Religion

Change &Time

Symbolism + Art

‘Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend
all summer long’
- ‘Fish, flesh or fowl’ =
biblical reference to
the book of Genesis
- Alliteration, images of
fertility, conception +
procreation

‘In one another’s arms,
birds in the trees, -Those
dying generations – at their
song’
- The punctuation
(dashes) represent
the transient nature
+impermanence of
life

‘Monuments of unageing
intellect’
- Whatever is new
born is too busy to
enjoy life to
appreciate these
great works of art,
monuments and
classical world

‘Monuments of its own
magnificence;’
- Alliteration,
monuments
commemorate the
dead/old

‘As in the gold mosaic of a
wall’
- ‘Gold’ Adjective
has various
connotations of
greed, represents
a secular
ambition,
something people
aspire to

‘A tattered coat upon a stick,
unless Soul clap its hands and
sing, and louder sing… And
therefore I have sailed the
seas and and come To the
holy city of Byzantium’
- Metaphorical journey
to find what is going
to make his soul sing
- Similar to
pilgrimages, they
used to pilgrimage to
Byzantium + idea of
exile, he’s exiling
himself from his
homeland to seek
something else
(rejecting the
physical world as
they do on
pilgrimages)
‘O sages standing in God’s

holy fire As in the gold
mosaic of a wall’
- Biblical, God is
speaking through
your intellect and
imagination
- ‘Mosaic’ = Gods glory
through decoration,
idea that search for
God is like a mosaic in
the sense that were
struck by it, attracted
to it but the mosaic is
fragile, like belief,
because it’s made up
of many small pieces
‘It knows not what it is; and
gather me Into the artifice of
eternity

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