While reading Yeats three poems I unconsciously swallowed about four brown cinnamon sugar pop-tarts....
Anyways, of the three poems my favorite by far was Sailing to Byzantium, especially the first stanza. I also found this the easiest one to understand...or maybe I just got it all wrong.
My favorite lines of the poem are in the first stanza:
" Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
monuments of unageing intellect."
From these lines, for me at least, I can really understand and empathize with the speaker's agony of old age. His yearning to find a way somehow to remain youthful really makes me see the desperation in being forgotten or left behind, which goes along with old age.
In the second stanza, the speaker goes on to say that:
" An aged man is but a paltry thing,
a tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, louder sing"
This, too, makes me feel sad for the speaker. For it seems like he is trying to figure out how to live when he is "fastened to a dying animal" (his body). My own grandparents, at times, have expressed somewhat embarrassingly to me, the same sort of helplessness. In the mind, heart, and soul, they are still full of life and energy. Yet, they physically can not achieve what they want to because they are trapped in their own bodies.
The last stanza is my second favorite of the poem. In it, the speaker desires to be taken away from "any natural thing" and to basically be kept beautiful in what the speaker goes on to describe as a work of art I feel like. This part very much reminds me of Ode to A Grecian Urn where the two lovers are left suspended outside of time, untouched by old age and ugliness, where they always will remain youthful and beautiful. By desiring to be taken away from any natural thing, it seems as if the speaker almost wants to be something fake, artificial, which would keep his body from aging and becoming ugly.
Basically, this poem made me dread getting old and ugly and being forgotten. Lovely.
First off bethan, let me say i love your title! i dont think i really connected with the sadness of this poem until i read this. how his unaging soul is weighted down by his frail body. It really made me think of that Tia, Tamera, and Taj Mowry movie Seventeen Again when the grandparents become teenagers again and are reliving things they used to be able to do but were unable to do as senior citizens.
ReplyDeleteThis really made me think of my grandparents too, especially of ones that have been forced into a retirement home to live out the rest of their days alone, how sad they must be...