Finding Meaning in Aging: W.B. Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’

The poet intended to convey our search for eternity, a search that intensifies as we age.

The palace complex stands on Seraglio Point, a promontory overlooking the Golden Horn at the junction of the Bosphorus Strait and the Sea of Marmara. Set on elevated, hilly terrain near the water, it occupies one of the highest positions in the area. Covering about 173 acres, the site previously housed the acropolis of ancient Byzantium in Greek and Byzantine periods. Halit Omer /Shutterstock

The prospect of aging seemed to haunt William Butler Yeats. Some of his most poignant poems, such as “When You Are Old” and “Among School Children,” address this theme. Yet perhaps the most famous of his “aging” poems—in fact, one of the most famous of all his poems—is called “Sailing to Byzantium.”

The 1927 poem follows the contours of thought of an old man reflecting on this changeable world he has outworn and which he yearns to leave behind in favor of some form of transcendence and immortality. As literature professor Oliver Tearle wrote, “The poem is about renouncing the hold of the world upon us, and attaining something higher than the physical or sensual.”