(sub)TEXT: The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog (opens in new tab)

Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” begins and ends with the concept of reproduction. In the first stanza, this reproduction is natural and sexual, and in the final stanza is entirely a matter of artifice. The living songbird is transformed into both product and producer, with a form of singing that is gilded by a consciousness of its departure from nature. Where natural reproduction replenishes entities that are neverthless always in the process of dying, art—the speaker seems to hope—is pot...