Sailing to Byzantium (by William Butler Yeats)

This is another of my favorite poems:

Sailing to Byzantium
by William Butler Yeats (1928)

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 unaging 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.

It is often said that all great poems are about love or death, or both. I have posted many on love, romantic love especially, so it is only fitting that now, I add one on death, though in its own way, this, too, speaks of love. It is not a love of any one thing, but a love of life and all that is living, of its beauty and magnificence, the sheer vivacity of the world, as seen in the poet's slower old age. It is a fierce, desperate love, the frozen fingers of a dying man curled around some scrap of memory, the desire to leave behind something lasting, a monument of wondrous gold, and yet not of any earthly make, because even the mightiest stone shall fall. He desires some work greater than his mortal flesh and blood. It is, in part, the reason for his writing.

This is one of Yeats's greatest poems (and him being Yeats, that's saying something), and possibly one of the greatest poems in all of modern English literature. Gosh, that man was brilliant.