Form in Yeat's "Sailing to Byzantium"

It seems like the same cycle happens with every generation. We spend our youth doing things that shock or upset our parents and grandparents generations, and then at some point when we figure out the things we like to do we start complaining about the generation after us and get all nostalgic for the days “when people actually knew how to write a good pop song”. The speaker in this poem has also fallen into this cycle, he feels out of place in his country that refuses to acknowledge anything but the present “Caught in that sensual music all neglect/Monuments of unaging intellect.”(7-8). He thinks they are not putting enough time thinking about anything that will actually last. To him the way to transcend our ephemeral nature is through art.  

I think the form of this poem gives us a great insight on what the speaker is feeling.  We know he is feeling nostalgic for tradition and for an era where art was valued so he chooses to write the poem in ottava rima, which is an Italian epic form of poetry. By choosing this form he is first making a statement to all the modernist poetry that was coming out at the time, which, did not typically use traditional forms. Secondly he is setting himself up as a sort of hero in that he is making sure that people don’t forget about tradition and about art. The irony in all of this is that he himself has taken liberties in changing the tradition of ottava rima. A dead itallian poet somewhere could be rolling in his grave if they were reading this poem. Traditionally the rhyme scheme for ottava rima is ABABABCC. Yeats kind of follws that pattern but often time the words don’t rhyme or are slant rhymes