W.B Yeats - Sailing to Byzantium Flashcards
Themes
escapism, immortality and the everlasting problems of old age in his poem
Poetic Techniques
first person
wistful tone
Byzantium itself is a metaphor for Yeats idyllic world-a world full of art and literature
‘That is no country for old men’
He is disgusted with himself and his body and views himself as a scarecrow in a ‘tattered coat’
‘Consume my heart away,sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal’
He wishes for his soul to leave his body, so he can go to a world (Byzantium ), where the old can thrive and fully participate.
‘Once out of nature I shall never take,/ My bodily form from any natural thing’
If reincarnation exist he would like be immortalized in art form. He would like to be a piece of Grecian art and to be ‘set upon a golden bough to sing’.
