Byzantium

At midnight in Byzantium, restless human spirits are purged into art.

A companion to "Sailing to Byzantium", set at midnight in the holy city. The noise of day fades, and a dome lit by moon or stars looks down in scorn on everything human, all the fury and mud of the blood. A ghostly image floats before the poet, a guide from the underworld whom he hails as superhuman. A golden bird on a golden bough crows like the cocks of Hades or mocks at living things. On the Emperor's pavement, spirits of the dead arrive and are purged in a flame that cannot burn, dying into a dance. In the last stanza more spirits come riding dolphins across the sea of life; the Emperor's goldsmiths and the marble floor break the flood, yet the sea goes on breeding new images.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 8Night falls on the city

   The unpurged images of day recede: the Emperor's drunken soldiers are in bed, the cathedral gong has sounded and the night-walkers' song dies away. A dome lit by stars or moon disdains everything human, all mere complexity, all "The fury and the mire" of the blood.

2. Lines 9 to 16The superhuman image

   An image floats before him, more shade than man, more image than shade. Like a bobbin wound in mummy-cloth, it can unwind the winding path from the world of the dead. A mouth with no breath can summon the breathless dead, and he hails it as superhuman, both death-in-life and life-in-death.

3. Lines 17 to 24The golden bird

   Next comes a golden bird, more miracle than bird or handiwork, set on a starlit golden bough. It can crow like the cocks of Hades, heralds of rebirth, or, embittered by the moon, scorn common birds and petals and all the complexities of mud and blood, in the glory of changeless metal.

4. Lines 25 to 32Dying into a dance

   At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit flames that no wood feeds, no steel lit and no storm disturbs, flames born of flame. Spirits born of blood come there, leave their fury behind and die into a dance, an agony of trance, in a fire that cannot singe a sleeve. This is purgation: suffering that purifies without destroying.

5. Lines 33 to 40The gong-tormented sea

   Spirit after spirit arrives astride a dolphin through the mire and blood of the sea. The Emperor's golden smithies and the marble dancing floor break the flood and its bitter complexity. Yet images keep begetting fresh images, and the poem ends on the teeming sea itself: life will not stop generating.

Themes

Context

The poem returns to the city of "Sailing to Byzantium", which had opened The Tower (Macmillan, 1928). Yeats wrote it in 1930, after a serious illness, and it was collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). Byzantium, later Constantinople and now Istanbul, was the capital of the eastern Roman Empire, famous for its gold mosaics and for an art in which religion and craft were one.

Yeats's friend Thomas Sturge Moore had objected that the golden bird of the earlier poem was still a thing of nature. The new poem goes further and makes the purging of the natural its whole subject. In ancient art dolphins were said to carry the souls of the dead to the Islands of the Blessed, which explains the riders of the last stanza.

Form

Five eight-line stanzas rhyming AABBCDDC, mixing long five-beat lines with very short ones of two or three beats. The short lines land like drumbeats or gong strokes, and heavy repetition (image, flame, complexity, blood) builds a chanting, incantatory music suited to a vision. The final stanza piles up exclamation and apposition as the flood breaks in.