W.B. Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium – Experimental Reading (Jazz)

Format: Video

Subject Matter: aging, art, Byzantine, immortality, soul, spiritual

Structure: Iambic pentameter, Ottawa rima

Jazz & poetry: W.B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium". An accompanied reading.

📖 W.B. Yeats wrote "Sailing to Byzantium" (published in The Tower in 1928) at the age of 62 — a meditation on ageing, artistic immortality, and the soul's longing to ...transcend the merely physical world. Byzantium, for Yeats, was not a historical place but a symbol of timeless art: the golden mosaics, the singing birds of hammered gold, the "artifice of eternity."

🎵 In this reading, the poem is accompanied by jazz (a Suno-assisted original composition) — a music that, like Yeats's late style, balances formal structure with passionate improvisation, and finds something eternal in the fleeting moment.

Poem: "Sailing to Byzantium" — W.B. Yeats (1928, The Tower)

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2 Comments

@noriokawakubo9508

March 10, 2026

I greatly admire your unique approach to English poetry. Your YouTube post offers a wonderful synthesis of music and poetic expression.

@anosensei

March 10, 2026

Thank you Norio!

W.B. Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium – Experimental Reading (Jazz)