Sailing to Byzantium by WB Yeats | The Great Poems Of All Time

Pneuma by Daniel Finneran

William Butler (WB) Yeats (1865 - 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and statesman.

A poet to whom I was introduced at the tender age of twelve, Yeats has continued to inhabit a special place in my heart.

His finest work, in my opinion, is "Sailing to Byzantium". After the collapse of Rome in the fifth century AD, the center of European culture shifted east to the Golden Horn. Renamed "Constantinople" after the famed Christian Emperor, Byzantium was, to Yeats, the spiritual homeland to which, in a modern world overcome by materialism, he yearned to return.

The tone of the poem, at its beginning, is wistful: Yeats, now an old man, feels like a stranger in both his time and place. The world around him abounds in flesh, sensuality, youth, and lust. It is, as he says, "no country for old men".

No.

The country in which he belongs, for which he pines, and to which, by way of his poetry, he'll take us, is that of the spirit.

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