How does the speaker seek to rejuvenate himself through art in "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats?

In "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats sees the creation of art as a possible method of escaping one's natural old age and mortality. The poem begins with a description of a world of life in conflict with the certainty of death. The speaker in the poem muses on the fragility of old age, and much of the poem focuses on ways of reversing, or at least remedying, this fragility. Some of the key lines pertaining to...

In "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats sees the creation of art as a possible method of escaping one's natural old age and mortality. The poem begins with a description of a world of life in conflict with the certainty of death. The speaker in the poem muses on the fragility of old age, and much of the poem focuses on ways of reversing, or at least remedying, this fragility. Some of the key lines pertaining to this theme occur in the final stanza. For example, the speaker says he wants to be reborn in "such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enamelling / To keep a drowsy Emperor awake" (27-9). In these lines, the speaker is asserting that artistic creation can sidestep old age and death, and that the artistic creative process has the ability to rejuvenate old age by making one essentially immortal. All in all, Yeats presents art as something timeless, something that can sing "Of what is past, or passing, or to come" (32), and so only by creating and engaging with art can one rejuvenate one's old age and escape one's inevitable mortality.