SOURCE: “Yeats's ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and Keats's ‘Ode to a Nightingale’,” in W. B. Yeats, 1865-1965: Centenary Essays on the Art of W. B. Yeats, edited by D. E. S. Maxwell and S. B. Bushrui, Ibadan University Press, 1965, pp. 217-19.

In the following essay, Fréchet assesses the influence of Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale” on “Sailing to Byzantium.”

The dissatisfaction with the world of the senses and the yearning after another world, expressed in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, are of course a common theme in romantic poetry; but some close analogies between the two poems suggest that Yeats had Keats's poem at the back of his mind while composing his own; and they certainly invite a comparison between the two.

‘My heart … sick with desire’ seems an echo of ‘My heart aches’; ‘Birds in the trees … at their song’ reminds us...