2. Presented To:
Ms. Nighat
Presented By:
M Haseeb
M.A English
NUML Multan
Campus

3. By William Butler Yeats

4. William
Butler Yeats
• William Butler Yeats was born in
Dublin, Ireland on June 13, 1865.
• He died in France on January 28,
1939.
• He wrote his poem “Sailing to
Byzantium” in 1928.
• It is about the agony of old age
and the imaginative and spiritual
work required to remain a vital
individual even when the heart is
"fastened to a dying animal" (the
body).
A portrait of WB Yeats by his father
John B. Yeats done in 1900

5. Light Green: Republic of
Ireland
Pink: Northern Ireland
Dark Green : County
Sligo

6. Breaking Down
the Poem
• The structure of “Sailing” is
sophisticated and concise.
Its verse form is called “Otta
Rima”.
• Otta Rima’s verse style is
related to the fact that
each stanza has eight lines.
• The Otta Rima’s rhyme
scheme is “a-b-a-b-a-b-c-
c”.
• The poem is styled in iambic
pentameter where there is
an accent on every second
beat of the syllables used in
that line.
A Byzantine Mosaic

7. Yeats and the Motifs
of “Sailing to
Byzantium”
• “Sailing to Byzantium” was
published in 1928.
• Yeats was old and was
afraid he was becoming
temporal as his inevitable
end approached him. Age
and immortality play a big
part in the poem.
• The world around Yeats was
changing as the old world
slipped into the new.
• The mysticism of Byzantium
binds together Yeats
interests in mysterious
esotericism and the beauty
of the distant orient.
Yeats in 1933 by Pirie MacDonald, six
years before his death

8. The First Two Stanzas
First Stanza
 “That is no country for old men”—
The poem opens boldly. The
speaker in the poem makes a
conclusive statement about the
physical Eden the poem begins
in.
 The speaker states in the first line
of the first stanza that this poem
will be about old age.
 Yeats contrasts an Eden-like
vision of a bountiful place with
visions of age and physical
decay and death.
Second Stanza
 This stanza reflects specifically on
aging as the speaker compares
an old man with a scarecrow.
 The scarecrow is described as
worn and tattered; but, by
adding the word “unless”, the
speaker seems to offer another
choice other than this vagabond
state. This choice being sailing to
Byzantium.
 The metaphysical singing of the
soul is contrasted with the first
stanza’s birds physically singing.
This implies the immortal soul
sings out inside the aging body.

9. The Last Two Stanzas
Third Stanza
 The sages invoked in the first line
of the stanza are mystics and
masters of esoteric knowledge,
knowledge that Yeats himself
studied and tried to understand.
 Fire has powerful symbolism in this
stanza. The sages stand in the
holy fire of God and the Speaker
asks for his heart to be consumed
in a sacrifice.
 Age is also brought up again. The
heart is “fastened to a dying
animal” while the immortal soul
begs for eternity.
Fourth Stanza
 The Speaker imagines escaping the
physical world and his aged body
and becoming a jeweled bird
made to amuse Byzantine
emperors.
 Yeats invokes many things over and
over again in this poem. The
physical singing of birds in the first
stanza has become metaphysical
as the speaker dreams of
becoming the golden and jeweled
bird.
 By leaving the birds in the trees in
the old world and becoming a bird
himself in the next, the speaker
creates a sense of unity in his quest
for immortality and meaning.

10. Themes
 Transformation
 Old Age
 Man and the
Natural World
 Spirituality

11. Conclusion
• In a world full of Modernism, he stuck closely to
traditional forms.
• While contemporary poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound were busy breaking down the entire
history of poetic form, writing poems that
jammed all sorts of forms together into a poem
that started to work like a great big set of Tinker
Toys, Yeats stuck to the classics.