An Analysis of "Sailing to Byzantium."

The poem "Sailing to Byzantium" is one of the most substantial pieces included in W.B. Yeats's final book "The Tower". Created in the later years of his life, many of the poems in The Tower deal with the issues of old age and leaving the natural world, but none so strongly as "Sailing to Byzantium". Byzantium itself symbolized eternity to Yeats; it was an ancient city that represented a place of artistic and intellectual …

…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.