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susceptible to time and would never age, similar to how art never decays or ages. He wanted to take the
form of a bird, a bird made "of hammered gold and gold enameling" like the mosaics in Ravenna, so that he
would never age and would always be permanent. However, as the last stanza continues, Yeats contradicts
himself and his belief that the world of artistic permanence is the ideal world. Yeats writes that he would be
a golden bird made to sing and "keep a drowsy emperor awake" (an image based on golden birds that
adorned trees in the palace of the Byzantine emperor) (Petica 81); one has to wonder why an emperor
would be drowsy in a perfect world, and why he would have to be kept awake by the song of a bird. Also,
the fact that Yeats' golden bird would be singing and rousing the emperor and the lords and ladies of
Byzantium is contradictory, because then it is the natural beauty, the sensual beauty of the singing that
keeps them awake, not the timeless golden enameling of the birds. This is the first clue that the imagination
always remains within bounds of mortality. The final line of he poem cements this belief, because though
Yeats has still written line after line about making the transition to a world of artistic permanence where
time does not exist, his closing line "of what is past, or passing, or to come" reflects the line in the first
stanza "whatever is begotten born and dies", showing that separating the intellect from the body, and the
natural world from the world of artistic permanence is something that is nearly impossible, or completely
impossible to achieve.
"Sailing to Byzantium" sets out to display the superiority of the world of art; to show that permanence can
be achieved through art as in Byzantium, and that human life by contrast is temporary. Yeats uses
contrasting images of the sensuous world and the world of art throughout the poem, such as the singing
fowl and the golden birds, the "young dying in each others arms" and the "sages", creating a tension and
conflict which he hopes to resolve by the end. Though the main idea the poem is to resolve that such a state
can be achieved, it can be interpreted as the permanent artistic world is almost an impossible place to reach
instead of an attainable one. Yeats sets out to prove that humans can transcend the natural world, but in his
closing stanza, leaves us to believe that there is no world of artistic permanence without the presence of
nature or without the influence of natural entities.
Works Cited:
1) Jeffares, Norman A. A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 1979.
2) Pethica, James. Yeats Poetry, Drama, and Prose. New York: W.W. Nortan & Company, 2000.
3) Yeats, William Butler. A Vision. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1966.