Sailing to Byzantium
by W. B. Yeats
 
 I
 
 

 
That is no country for old men. The young

 
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

 
— Those dying generations — at their song,

 
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

 
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

5
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

 
Caught in that sensual music all neglect

 
Monuments of unageing intellect.

 
   
 II
   
An aged man is but a paltry thing,  
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless 10
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing  
For every tatter in its mortal dress,  
Nor is there singing school but studying  
Monuments of its own magnificence;  
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come 15 
To the holy city of Byzantium.  
   
 III

 
 

 
O sages standing in God’s holy fire

 
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

 
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

 
And be the singing-masters of my soul.

20
Consume my heart away; sick with desire

 
And fastened to a dying animal

 
It knows not what it is; and gather me

 
Into the artifice of eternity.

 
   
 IV
 
 

 
Once out of nature I shall never take

25
My bodily form from any natural thing,

 
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

 
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

 
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

 
Or set upon a golden bough to sing

30 
To lords and ladies of Byzantium

 
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 
   
 
That — Ireland
 
commend — a verb meaning to praise in a formal or official way. The noun commendation derives from this root.
 
Byzantium — the city that marks one border between Europe and Asia. It was founded by Greeks as Byzantium around 657 B.C.E. The Roman Emperor Constantine rebuilt the city between 324 and 330 A.D. and proclaimed it Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. It remained the capital and was referred to as both Constantinope and Byzantium until the Empire fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks. Muslims referred to the city as Istanbul (which just means to the city); it was officially renamed in 1930.
 
mosaic — a form of art in which small pieces of hard materials (stones, ceramic, glass, even semi-precious and precious stones) are arranged to form an image. Byzantinae art is famous for its mosaics.
 
golden bough — While this literally means the branch of a tree, Yeats is punning here on the title of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, one of the great books in the history of the world and a foundational text of the discipline of anthropology. Frazer was the first to trace common myths, as well as religious practices such as fertility rites and ritual sacrifice, across cultures, religions, and millennia. Originally published in 1890, The Golden Bough had grown to twelve volumes by 1915. Despite its exalted reputation, The Golden Bough was controversial in some quarters when it appeared because Frazer showed how many elements of the Christian tradition had predecessors in pagan religions; those sections were omitted from the 1922 abridged edition and not restored until 1994.