Sailing to Byzantium

Poem by William Butler Yeats
the novella by Robert Silverberg

"Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1927 reprint of Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose, and then in the 1928 collection The Tower. It comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight lines of iambic pentameter. It uses a journey to Byzantium (Constantinople) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and the human spirit may converge. Through the use of various poetic techniques, Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of eternal life as well as his conception of paradise.

A second poem written by W. B. Yeats, "Byzantium", extends and complements "Sailing to Byzantium". It blends descriptions of the medieval city in nighttime darkness with spiritual, supernatural and artistic imagery. The short story "No Country for Old Men" by Irish author Seán Ó Faoláin, about two veterans of the Irish War of Independence struggling to find their place in the Irish Republic of the 1950s, takes its title from the first line of the poem. His daughter, author Julia O'Faolain, added her own twist when she titled her Booker nominated 1980 novel No Country for Young Men. An espionage novel by Alan Schwartz, No Country for Old Men (New York: New American Library, 1980) follows three main characters from New York to Washington, Paris, Buenos Aires and Santiago, through a labyrinth of multinational power and international corruption, where rules and stakes shift constantly and adversaries wear many masks. A science fiction novella by the same name by Robert Silverberg was published in 1985. The story, like the poem, deals with immortality and includes quotations from the poem. Oscar winning film director Michael Cimino (who was an avid reader of Yeats), wrote an unpublished novel named after the poem. Philip Roth's 2001 short novel The Dying Animal takes its title from the third stanza, and is explicitly referenced in the text. Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay's historical fantasy duology The Sarantine Mosaic was inspired by this poem. A song on Lisa Gerrard and Patrick Cassidy's 2004 album Immortal Memory was named after the poem. The title of the 2005 novel No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy and the 2007 Oscar winning film adapted from it, comes from the first line of this poem. In the 2020 video game Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Projekt Red, the last verse of “Sailing to Byzantium” is recited by the A. I. Alt Cunningham during the “Changes” quest.