Sailing to Byzantium

“Sailing to Byzantium” consists of four, short vignettes rich with hazy descriptions of the speaker and his outlook on life as an aging man. The brevity of the stanzas requires readers to fill in the blanks, in alignment with the principles of Modernist Imagism. For instance, the very first line begins with the ambiguous word “that,” as the speaker gazes at a nameless countryside: “That is no country for old men” (Line 1). Youthfulness and vitality are implied through tokens or representations of the broader concepts. In other words, an image of the speaker’s subjective interpretation of the world is given through objective signifiers (fish, fowl, and the like). Like Ezra Pound’s definition of an “image” in “Imagism,” the poem “presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

While many of his contemporaries were embracing free verse, Yeats presented himself as a master of traditional poetic forms. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” he abides by ottava rima, an Italian form of composition consisting of eight lines of mostly iambic pentameter, with an abababcc rhyme scheme. The form emerged in late 13th century Italian religious verse, as well as troubadour songs.