Sailing to Byzantium
Sailing to Byzantium
by William Butler Yeats

Sailing to Byzantium Themes

Little Words, Big Ideas

Transformation

Life gives way to death. Youth turns into age. Change, it seems, is always in the air. Frustrated by the cruelty of natural cycles, the speaker of "Sailing to Byzantium" tries to initiate a new dyn...

Old Age

Growing old just isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. "Sailing to Byzantium" begins as a meditation on the things which age leaves behind: bodily pleasure, sex, and regeneration. As de...

Man and the Natural World

Tennyson once wrote a pretty great poem about "nature, red in tooth and claw." In other words, nature can be pretty brutal. In Yeats’s poem, that’s certainly the case. No matter who (or...

Spirituality

Art and the human spirit fuse in this poem as Yeats attempts to find some way to move outside the problems of the human body. Spirituality in this poem is strongly linked to the body: there’s...