Sailing to Byzantium Themes

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...

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...

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...

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...