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Sailing To Byzantium Poem Analysis

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Art is the legacy of humanity, an ageless pillar of history, experience, and emotion. WB Yeats uses his lyric poem to illustrate an old man’s final goodbye to the world he knows, a world that he has no desire for, and his dream of going to Byzantium, a place that is filled only with the undying ideals of artistry. Yeats’ poem uses a speaker, utilizing tone and theme, supplemented by paradox, to profess that he has no need for the current world that is made for the youth, but yearns for a world that could cure his ailing struggle with the circle of life and arrive in the immortal city with all its imaginative capabilities. “Sailing to Byzantium,” begins with a speaker, an old man, undertaking a voyage to a world beyond his, “the holy city of Byzantium.” Although an ancient city, it is used figuratively to conjure images of a surreal city not consumed by the horrors of time. A main theme in the poem is time, and the speaker’s struggle with the effects of time. In the first stanza, the speaker meditates on no longer being able enjoy youthfulness, but there’s almost a sense that the speaker may despise their ignorance:

“Caught in the sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.”
Here the speaker displays a distaste of the youth’s enamoration of the voluptuous, and their inability to understand the ideals of experience. Again that same theme is followed again at the end of stanza two:
“Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;”
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