Question

Write an interpretation of the work using literature elements to explain important ideas

That may not be apparent to the reader . You must a thesis statement

Topic :william butler yeats sailing to byzantium

Answer 1

"Sailing to Byzantium" may be a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published within the 1928 collection The Tower. It comprises four stanzas in stanza , each made from eight lines of iambic pentameter. It uses a journey to Byzantium as a metaphor for a spiritual journey.
Byzantium symbolizes a world of artistic magnificence and permenance, conjuring up within the mind of the reader, an upscale and inclusive culture like that related to the Byzantium empire. The images of birds, fish and young lovers employed by Yeats within the first stanza symbolises transience and mortality.
Major Themes in “Sailing to Byzantium”: Man versus nature and eternity are the major of this poem. The poem presents two things: the transience of life and the permanence of nature. The speaker wants to flee from the planet where wise people are neglected.
Sailing to Byzantium,” is actually about the problem of keeping one's soul alive during a fragile, failing physical body .
The poem's tone is meditative as the speaker searches for answers, and it has a tone of longing, for he is "sick with desire.
Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and therefore the human spirit may converge. Through the utilization of varied poetic techniques, Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" describes the metaphorical journey of a person pursuing his own vision of life eternal also as his conception of paradise.
Sailing to Byzantium" is Yeats' definitive statement about the agony of adulthood and therefore the imaginative and spiritual work required to stay an important individual even when the guts is "fastened to a dying animal" (the body). Yeats's solution is to go away the country of the young and visit Byzantium, where the sages within the city's famous gold mosaics could become the "singing-masters" of his soul. He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him faraway from his body into an existence outside time, where, sort of a great work of art, he could exist in "the artifice of eternity." within the final stanza of the poem, he declares that when he's out of his body he will nevermore appear within the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past ("what is past"), this (that which is "passing"), and the future (that which is "to come").
The speaker, an old man, leaves behind the country of the young for a visionary quest to Byzantium, the traditional city that was a serious seat of early Christianity. There, he hopes to learn how to move past his mortality and become something more like an immortal work of art.
The poet during this poem wishes to sail and attend an imaginary world (or country): Byzantium, where the artist, almost impersonal, manages to reflect this vision of an entire people. This world (or country) had a culture so integrated on produce an art which could have the impact of single image. The world that the poet wants to leave to sail to Byzantium is “transfixed by the sensual music of its singing birds which is represented by decaying multitudinous bodies – fish, flesh, foul. These “dying generations” (line 3) of the world’s birds sing songs to the body, songs which distract all people from the contemplation of “monuments of un-ageing intellect” (line 8) which alone can justify an old man’s existence and which can't be produced in modern chaotic times.
In the first stanza, the poet says that he is sailing to Byzantium from Ireland because the country is not suitable for old people to live there. Old men are exclude from that sort of life that's available here, because life there's all physical and sensual. From this life he is sailing to the city of Byzantium where an intellectual life is awaiting him.
The stanza says in the country the young people enjoy the pleasures of love. Birds, fish and all other creatures lead an animal, physical life which is spent in procreation. All kinds of creatures are born, they indulge in sex, and they procreate and in due course die. They do not lead intellectual and artistic existence. The waterfalls of ‘That country is crowded with salmon fish. The seas there are teeming with mackerel fish. All these creatures (birds and fish) hear sensual music and don't enjoys intellectual or artistic activity. Sensual music is that which appeals to the senses as distinguished from the mind or the intellect. The intellectual achievements are supposed to be ageless and immortal and so of permanent value. Obviously the reference is to things of beauty which are joy forever.
The second stanza says that the poet, as an old man, is sailing to Byzantium from Ireland. In the first stanza, he poet has described the country which he's sailing faraway from . In the second stanza, the poet portrays the advantages of the country of his arrival for an old man like him.
The poet begins by saying that an aged man is worthless. With a tattered coat upon his weak and thin body, the old man seems like a scare-crow. The aged man acquires some merit or value as long as adulthood is amid a spiritual recognition by admiring the good works of art.
A man merely old is worse off than youth; something positive must be added. If the soul can wax and grow strong as the body wanes with advancing years, then every step in the dissolution of the body (every tatter in its mortal dress) is cause for a further increase in joy. But this can happen only if the soul can rejoice in its own power and magnificence.

The soul of the old man must be strong to hunt that which is neglected by youth. so as to try to to this the old man must sail to Byzantium, which the poet describes because the Celestial City of Byzantium. Byzantium is that the symbol of the perfect , aesthetic and transformed existence, and suggests a far-off, unfamiliar civilization where art is for its own sake and whose religion is in an exotic form.
In the line 9, when the poet says, “An aged man is but a paltry thing,” he means an aged (old) person is paltry (an insignificant thing), while in line 10 of the poem, when he says, “A tattered coat upon a stick,” he makes use of a metaphor, which presents an adulthood as an old wiped out coat hung upon a bamboo pole or stick. In line 10 to 11, when he says, “Unless/Soul clap its hands and sing,” he means to mention that unless the soul feels thrilled, claps its hands and sings a cheerful song, that is, a state of spiritual exaltation. By “and louder sing/For every tatter in it mortal dress, he means the more wiped out is bodily dress, the louder the soul sings. Lines 13 to 14: neither is there………….. own magnificence, he says that the simplest music for the sold of an old man is that the study and appreciation of the grand monuments of immortal intellect.
In the third stanza, the poet now ‘appeals to the sages who substitute God’s holy fire and who have thus been purged of the last remnants of sensuality. These sages appear as if the figures represented within the gold mosaic of a wall. The poet wants them to return out of the holy fire and to descend upon him with a hawk-like movement. He wants them to become the ‘singing masters of his soul’, and to purify his heart. In other words, to show him to concentrate to his spiritual music as distinguished from the sensual music (which the poet has mentioned earlier in stanza one). The poet has yet not been ready to get obviate his sensual desires which still hold close him. In fact, he, an aged man on the verge of death, is unable to know his own reality. Only those sages can purge his heart of all impurity, and provides him the permanence which great objects of art posses.

In line 1 of the poem, when the poet says O sages, he addresses the saints, by ‘standing in God’s holy fire, the poet refers to the figures of sages (saints) standing within the holy fire of God to purge themselves by this performance of penance. In line 2, by ‘As within the gold mosaic of a wall, the poet means the figures that were represented within the gold mosaic in Apollinare in Revanra. The word ‘mosaic’ means the artistic pattern that's formed by placing together precious stones of varied colors. By line 3: beginning of the holy fire shown within the mosaic is that the ‘pern during a gyre’, which suggests a column of smoke during a circular motion, which by “And fastened to a dying animal, he means his heart is tied to a dying body and doesn't know or comprehend its own reality. By “Sick with desire,” he means his heart is sick because it is filled with dross of earthy desires.
In the first stanza of the poem, the poet presents his dislike for the physical and sensual life in Ireland; within the second stanza, he talks about what of spiritual life the poet would lead within the golden city of Byzantium, and therefore the third stanza is addressed to the sages of Byzantium to form his soul purged of all remaining sensuality. But during this last stanza of the poem, the poet says what quite form he would really like to change state in his re-birth.
Once he has renounced his early body, he wouldn't wish to be re-born within the same or in the other earthly shape. He will reject all physical incarnations because all living beings are subject to mortality and death. He would really like to be within the shape of a golden bird, the type of bird which Grecian goldsmiths are believed to possess designed for the pleasure of an emperor. As a golden bird, a piece of art, he would be beyond decay or death and would therefore be unlike the “dying generations” of real birds (of the primary stanza).
As a golden bird, he are going to be placed on a golden bough, and can appear to be singing songs of all times, the past, this and therefore the future, to an audience of the lords and ladies of Byzantium. within the shape of a singing golden bird, his song are going to be that of spiritual ecstasy which can be shown by the soul “clapping its hands and singing.” then within the shape of singing golden bird he are going to be surrounded, not by young lovers and other animal creatures of the sexual cycle but by an audience that might be elegant and abstract. In Byzantium he will haven't any age, past, present or future.

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