An Analysis of "Sailing to Byzantium."

The poem "Sailing to Byzantium" is one of the most substantial pieces included in W.B. Yeats's final book "The Tower". Created in the later years of his life, many of the poems in The Tower deal with the issues of old age and leaving the natural world, but none so strongly as "Sailing to Byzantium". Byzantium itself symbolized eternity to Yeats; it was an ancient city that represented a place of artistic and intellectual permanence. Yeats believed that ""in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architects a…