FAMOUS PLAYWRIGHT POET AND OTHERS
MACBETH
|
Question
[CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
|
|
|
Sailing to Byzantium
|
|
|
Byzantium
|
|
|
The Second Coming
|
|
|
Leda and the Swan
|
Detailed explanation-1: -And be the singing‐masters of my soul. Into the artifice of eternity. Of what is past, or passing, or to come. “Sailing to Byzantium” is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928 collection The Tower.
Detailed explanation-2: -In Yeats’s poem, the impermanent dying heart or body is sacrificed for the permanence of singing intellect, golden art, the “artifice of eternity.” By stanza four, the journey becomes fully imaginative, a reverie of life after death.
Detailed explanation-3: -“Sailing to Byzantium, ” by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), reflects on the difficulty of keeping one’s soul alive in a fragile, failing human body. The speaker, an old man, leaves behind the country of the young for a visionary quest to Byzantium, the ancient city that was a major seat of early Christianity.
Detailed explanation-4: -The four eight-line stanzas of “Sailing to Byzantium” take a very old verse form: they are metered in iambic pentameter, and rhymed ABABABCC, two trios of alternating rhyme followed by a couplet.
Detailed explanation-5: -Yeats discusses the themes of mortality and immortality in “Sailing to Byzantium". He contrasts the two and moves from mortality in the real world to immortality in an ancient holy city. Lively animals (like singing birds, swimming fish) all show vitality but will also age: “… Whatever is begotten, born, and dies."