1. Sailing to Byzantium
By W. B. Yeats

2. Byzantium
Byzantium was an ancient Greek city, founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 667 BC and named after their king Byzas. The name Byzantium is a Latinisation of the original name Byzantion. The city was later renamed Constantinople and briefly became the imperial residence of the classical Roman Empire, and then subsequently was, for more than a thousand years, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, the Greek-speaking Roman Empire of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Constantinople was captured by the Ottoman Turks, becoming the capital of their empire, in The name of the city was officially changed to Istanbul in 1930 following the establishment of modern Turkey.
Yeats words: “Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy.”

6. Read the poem looking for evidence of the following ideas…
Descriptions of youth
Productivity and regeneration
Permanence
Mortality
Separation of soul and body
Opposites: such as youth and age, body and soul, nature and art, transient and eternal – yet each dependent on the other
The tension between art and life
Byzantine art did not attempt to represent human forms

7. Worksheet 21.1 Complete the table with quotations from the poem.
Choose the most appropriate quote to accompany each image below.
Discuss and annotate the poem

8. Consider the following critical responses to the poem…
A. Norman Jeffares, said of this stage of Yeat’s work: he shows a “sharpened apprehension, brought by Ireland's civil war, of approaching conflagration in the world, and, by approaching age, of ruin and decay.”
An early critic, T. Sturge Moore, told Yeats in 1930 that he found the first three stanzas “magnificent” but believed the fourth to “weaken to an ineffective and unnecessary repetition of ‘gold’ four times in as many lines, … implying that the contrast between artificial and natural forms is fundamental, which is obviously not the case.”
Yeats's biographer, Richard Ellmann writes that Yeats attempted “to evoke a symbol—in the poem as a whole and also in the symbolic bird spoken of in the poem—which would have a life of its own into which he could put himself.”