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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeats has written about "The Second Coming" which fallen, secularized man is still unprepared for, so foolish and slow of heart as to disdain both tradition and truth for the trappings of life's daily tragedies.
He has written of the infinite, intimate, and minute thrill of an Irish airman who will meet his fate above the clouds. Yeats taps into the Romantic impulse of a man who is drifting through the vestiges of a weakened world wondering and wandering for something meaningful, yet abandoning the very premise of meaning, and thus finding not promise or solace of peace in the morass of moral myopia.
A world that has no respect for the past, which insists on recreating the future based on the empty and transient knowledge of sense will find no win or desire in the old men who remember what is was all like, and wish for it what can never return to be resurrected. So, in this poem, the poet longs for a land that will remember him, that will honor who he was, who is, and will make sure that others will remember, too.
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.
The pleasures of the moment, to the more respectable, "sins for a season."
"Old" is cast as "lifeless" or engaged, cast out or cast away from the easy, useless fun of the younger generation, so caught up in themselves, who have no interest in the "unageing intellect", monuments of no importance to the boy and girl enraptured in their momentary bliss. "Birds in the trees" is a trite phrase, yet in the genius of Yeats' preliminary cynical observation, this phrase is an indictment against "the young" not the "old men".
Yet for all their young, they are "dying generation", one which marginalizes the same teeming life of crowded seas, the alliteration of "salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas" giving off the sound of fishes flopping against each other, slapping the water and pushing the limits of nature.
"Fish, flesh, fowl" -- heated, bated alliteration, "sensual music", signalling the heavy fall of life waiting to exhale, and like the same breath of two entwined lovers, does not last long.
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.
In direct contrast to the "unageing intellect", there is the "aged man" who is "paltry", nothing noble like the monuments everlasting which capture the respect of younger generations. To the masses caught up in the show of things, the old man is a "tattered coat", a reminder of a once-wonderful piece of cloth, now all worn out and never to be worn again, bereft of shape or power, merely standing on a stick. The rips on a coat mean nothing unless someone praises the old man for what he has endured, such that he ended up all ripped up. Just as a historian only can begin to respect the sacrifice which veteran has made on behalf of his country, or only a widow can reminisce with grandeur the sacrifices of a now-deceased spouse, so a "soul" a man endowed with memory and a measured respect, can "clap its hands and sing, and louder sing".
Kierkegaard in his work "Fear and Trembling" describes the hero and the poet, that the feats of a hero die without the song and praise of the poet. Here, in a sense, the poet descants on the sorrow that accompanies the old man who has done so much, yet only the soul, the deeper part of a person, can appreciate all that he has done. Since the younger generations care only for the imposing "monuments", the big things that can be seen and inspire in their physical capacities, the old man commands no respect.
To the poet, there is no more singing, no "singing school" where the next generation will not just learn by love the efforts of the older men. Instead of poets who will sing the praises to commemorate the former exploits of fallen men, there is "studying" of those monuments, which enrapture the viewer because of "its own magnificence". Such is the tragedy in trying to remember something or someone great, that the act, or the creation, that seeks to commemorate takes on a greater design than the action or the actor intended for celebration.
For this sheer and insulting confusion, the poet, identified as a slighted old man, has sailed "to the holy city of Byzantium."
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.
"Sages" has the traveling, sailing old man found here in Byzantium, a city, a memory, a great world which once was, whose monuments remain. Perhaps he has found the "soul clap" that he was looking for. The sages stand, not sit, in "God's holy fire", suggesting that they are ready to receive and to achieve for their aged visitor. He asks them to be his "singing-masters" -- masters of song and to give a masterful song, one in which the old man is the subject, not merely an object of curiosity.
"God's holy fire" -- here, the poet alludes to the divine aura, the lingering sentiment of sanctity which has never left this land. They stand in the fire like gold in a mosaic, standing out as well as remaining in the beauty, also an allusion to the mosaics which glittered throughout the city on the straits of Bosporus. Instead of a "gyre" that widens without holding, here the "gyre" spins forth a fire to gather together a value and a victory for a man still searching for respect.
"Consume my heart away" -- he wants to be rid of himself, even as he seeks to find some solace to celebrate him. The heart is not happy, having found no hearth in his former homeland to honor him. He is distinct from the rest of his organism, "a dying animal" which has lost contact with himself. The imagery suggests a slowing dying away, a desperation that may never find rest "Consume' "sick with desire' "dying animal" and ''gather" indicate a culmination leading to the cessation of life. In asking to enter "the artifice of eternity", a faint cynicism manages to poke through, as if the sailor who has arrived at Byzantine shores still believes that he will not find what he is looking for. Eternity as "artifice" may suggest, instead, the inevitable glory that will consume him, just like his heart.
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.
No longer flesh and blood, he has become a part of the gilded enamel of old mosaics. "Out of nature" speaks of his death, his departure from the world of sense into the realm of artifice. Now he joins the gold mosaics of old, and has become the pastime of kinds, "to keep a drows Emperor awake." Or instead of a picture on a wall, he is a song, "set upon a golden bough" to entertain royal persons, in constrast to the flush and lusty youths infered in the first stanza of this poem. No longer a "tattered coat on a stick", he is a gleaming, golden artwork, a song of measure and majesty.
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