Revelation of hidden life in Sailing to Byzantium by W B Yeats
In his poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats discards his usual perceptions of the mortal world and imagines a paradise of complete intellectuality, that is Byzantium. Throughout Yeats’s poem he uses many different aspects to achieve a revelation of hidden life. ... Yeats also uses a visionary sequence through-out “Sailing to Byzantium“. ... Dreaming and irrational thinking is what “Sailing to Byzantium” is entirely composed of. In the first stanza, Yeats depicts a world in which a great distance exists between himself and his present mortal existence. In his "mortal dress" (Yeats, ln12), Yeats exists as a ragged old man who has nothing to offer the world in his physical body. In an effort to escape to a place of intellectualism that will not restrain him, as his own "country [not] for old men" (Yeats, ln1) does, Yeats’s begins by physically progressing on a journey but finds himself sailing to eternity (Byzantium). His dream begins when, instead of focusing on the failure of his physical body, Yeats fixates on his own intellect and describes it as being “fastened to a dying animal” (22) (Jalic). Being in such a “Paltry” (Yeats, ln 9) condition, Yeats is now able to put forth his illusions of this perfect yet unattainable island of eternity. Yeats then begins to shun his mortal world because of the rejection he faces as an ageing man.