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Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium.(rhyme and meaning in William Butler Yeats's poetry)(Critical Essay)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 20030622
Author:Kimball, Elizabeth

"Sailing to Byzantium" embodies a number of Yeats's most enduring tropes: the old man as scarecrow, the cycles of history as the gyre, the pristine and preserved world of Byzantium as escape. In the final stanza of the poem, and the speaker asks implicitly to be made into an artificial bird that might sing of past, present, and future. Much has been made of this bird aspiration, starting with Yeats's own note that he had "read somewhere" about mechanical birds in Byzantium, and continuing with critics' examinations of Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's Nightingale" ...

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