SOURCE: Jeffares, A. Norman. “The Tower: ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’” In A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, pp. 211-16. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1984.

In the following essay, Jeffares identifies geographical, historical, literary, and religious sources and allusions found in “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Yeats's change of style and his maturity were probably not generally recognised until the publication of The Tower in 1928. This volume was a collection of poems which reflect the richness of his life: marriage, a family, senatorship of the Irish Free State, the Nobel Prize for poetry, A Vision published, the discovery of his Anglo-Irish ancestry in politics and literature. There was also the sharpened apprehension, brought by Ireland's civil war, of approaching conflagration in the world and, by approaching age, of ruin and decay. Yeats had become ‘a smiling sixty-year-old public man’, but with ironic memories of lost youth and love...