It has been a long established critical tradition that Yeats`s "Sailing to Byzantium" is a consummate Platonic poem, which celebrates the supremacy of soul over body, of art over nature. The poem is fully equipped with the kind of rhetorical devices and poetic structures that tend to lead readers to one or another transcendental reading. The transcendental approach, in turn, has been influenced by what can be broadly termed as Yeats`s `intentions,` including his remarks on his own poem, biographical information, and the way the holy city of Byzantium becomes a symbol of Unity in his theosophy. This paper offers another look at the much celebrated poem. While the authorial intentions and the symbolic functions of Byzantium and the golden bird in the context of the poet`s private myth should be taken into consideration and carefully explored in every reading of the poem, they do not serve, I would like to argue, as the best guides to its full intellectual and emotional potential; rather, the significance of Byzantium and the golden bird should be understood in the immediate ontological context of the poem, in which the poet`s `Byzantine` symbols of transcendence and art can be given more human significance as recalcitrant, earthly images. In other words, the poem`s value derives from its failure to become a Platonic lyric.