My first toe into this water:

"Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats.

Here it is, and I'm sure Yeats will be pleased to know that I quite liked it. I've read this poem before, of course, being a good English major, but it's been fifteen years, probably, at least:

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Here's a bit about the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium turned into Constantinople, which became the capital of the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire. Until the Ottoman Turks came and took it over. It's Istanbul now. Did you know the Ottoman Turks didn't shove off until 1923? But Yeats means it as a symbol of the world of the spirit and eternity. To which he was going. Instead of this sensual world of fish and lovers and whatnot. Which was not a place for an old man. Yeats wants to be translated into that old eternal world of gold mosaic, since his dying animal form is no longer significant in the world of birth and begetting.

In the third stanza, Yeats uses the phrase "perne in a gyre." What the heck does that mean? The words are not words. Here's a piece of collage art with that title. Here's a piece of music too. I think the most popular interpretation is that it means a spinning spool. Perne being the spool, and gyre being the spin. He wants the ancient sages to come teach him to be part of the infinite. To go out of nature.

Is this the old, old song of "Curse this vile body"? Or do I just always impose that onto things?

Labels: poetry, yeats