Why Liz Roche chose this poem
My aunt, a teacher of English, read me the poem at a young age. What struck me then, and today still, was the daunting prospect of one day leaving the realm of “whatever is begotten, born, and dies” and journeying beyond, into the unknown. This impermanence gets played out in my dancing life over and over again. For me nothing is constant; the body is always changing, always moving, bringing me to places I don’t yet fully understand. Yeats seemed to soften that journey for himself by sailing to Byzantium, where he imagined all to be right and balanced. He eventually found his “permanence” in art, a comforting thought perhaps. For me, I’m still wondering.
Liz Roche is a choreographer and dancer
Sailing to Byzantium
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.
