SOURCE: O'Donnell, William H. “Poems 1922-1926: ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’” In The Poetry of William Butler Yeats: An Introduction, pp. 89-92. New York: The Ungar Publishing Company, 1986.

In the following essay, O'Donnell considers “Sailing to Byzantium” as an attempt at escaping the decay of aging—the impermanence of mortal life—through a separate world of art.

In “A Prayer for my Daughter” Yeats was concerned with physical threats from storm and warfare as well as cultural threats from the deterioration of traditional, aristocratic values. Those external threats continue to be an important concern in the poems that Yeats wrote in the mid-1920s, but his range of topics expanded to include old age and bodily decrepitude. The resulting collection of poems, The Tower, published in 1928, is his finest single volume, and it might also be the finest single book of poems published in the twentieth century.

Most of the...