Third stanza

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Having arrived at Byzantium, the speaker in stanza three begins a prayer to the sages within the city. The speaker asks these wise men to step from their “holy fire” (III.19) and teach his soul to sing. He asks them to consume his worldly body, his soul bound to the earth and incapable of understanding its true potential. With these bindings removed, the speaker hopes to be cleverly assimilated by the continuum of eternity.

Twice attributed to the sages, the “holy fire” (III.17,19) links the third stanza with the “holy city” (II.16) of stanza two. This fire represents the power of the city to cleanse the speaker. The fire, coming from God (III.17), is as timeless as its source, and the metaphor continues with the speaker praying for this fire to consume his “heart away” (III.23). The fire also alludes again to bird imagery in the form of the Phoenix, a legendary creature whose body is engulfed in flames and is reborn within its own ashes; so too does the speaker wish to be reborn in like manner.

The word gyre means a spool or bobbin. Yeats also uses in this stanza the image of the spinning “gyre” (III.19) of fate to describe the cleansing fire (Britannica). Once processed by this gyre, the speaker will attain the eternal presence he seeks. Britannica writes, “The old man of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ imagined the city’s power as being able to ‘gather him into the artifice of eternity’ – representative of or embodying all knowledge, linked like a perfect machine at the center of time.” This “perfect machine” is the embodiment of the speaker’s heaven.