Hello and welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Curle.

Today's poem is by William Butler Yates, a poet who you have heard from on this show previously.

And this poem is called Sailing to Byzantium.

This is one of those poems that is highly anthologized, like many of the poems. and this poem is called Sailing to Byzantium.

This is one of those poems that is highly anthologized,

like many of the poems I've read so far on this show.

It is one of the examples that made William Butler Yates one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century.

He was an Irish poet who lived from 1865 to 1939.

I'm going to read the poem first, and then I'm going to offer some comments,

even going to include some comments that Yates had about the poem himself.

So first, here is Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yates.

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.

Cotton that, sensual music, all neglect monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing.

A tattered coat upon a stick and less 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,

...