Sailing to Byzantium

The speaker begins by lamenting the hardship of life for an aging man who feels unappreciated and anachronistic living amidst the vitality of nature and its cycles of “sensual music” (Line 7). The narrator is at odds with this energetic and lush setting. He is “but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick” (Lines 9-10). His aging body is compared to tattered coat which clothes his “unageing intellect” (Line 8)—the throne of the eternal soul. These lines demonstrate how “Sailing to Byzantium” is in dialogue with other poems from The Tower. In "Among School Children," for example, the body is also disparaged as “[o]ld clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird,” which establishes an analogical relationship between scarecrows and human beings, implying that a defense of humanity could easily amount to a straw man argument since authentic living is dormant in the mind.

The speaker’s dismissive view of bodies directly coincides with images of sexual activity in nature’s reproductive processes: “Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long / Whatever is begotten, born, and dies” (Lines 5-6). Summer is a life-affirming season, during which the activities of animals—such as hunting and reproducing—reach their peak.