<P> 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 unageing 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 . </P> <P> "Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928 collection The Tower . It comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight ten - syllable lines . It uses a journey to Byzantium (Constantinople) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey . Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and the human spirit may converge . Through the use of various poetic techniques, Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of eternal life as well as his conception of paradise . </P> <P> Written in 1926 (when Yeats was 60 or 61), "Sailing to Byzantium" is Yeats' definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is "fastened to a dying animal" (the body). Yeats's solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city's famous gold mosaics could become the "singing - masters" of his soul . He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could exist in "the artifice of eternity ." In the final stanza of the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past ("what is past"), the present (that which is "passing"), and the future (that which is "to come"). </P> <P> Yeats wrote in a draft script for a 1931 BBC broadcast: </P>

In the poem sailing to byzantium why are they going to byzantium
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