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Byzantium

In the context of the speaker’s journey, the ancient Greek city of Byzantium symbolizes the final phase of his spiritual transformation. During this phase, the speaker imagines transitioning out of his mortal frame and assuming an immortal form that he associates with art. He imagines achieving this transformation through the intercession of Christian sages, whom he envisions as being shrouded in a holy fire resembling the luminescent shine of a gold mosaic. In this way, the speaker’s spiritual goal represents a unification of art and religion, each of which may be understood as manifesting different aspects of a higher truth. It is precisely this unification that Byzantium symbolizes for the speaker. And indeed, Byzantium was personally significant to Yeats for the way it brought art and religion into meaningful correspondence with everyday life. As he wrote in his 1925 book A Vision: “I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one.” For the speaker, too, Byzantium represents the culmination of his spiritual life. Of course, since Byzantium came to an end in 330 CE, when it became Constantinople, the speaker cannot literally go there. He must therefore make the journey in his imagination alone.

Gold

The color gold plays an important symbolic role in the poem, where it represents a bridge between aesthetic pleasure and spiritual transcendence. The key reference to gold appears in the poem’s third stanza, where the speaker addresses Christian sages from an earlier time (lines 17–20):

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.

In the first two lines, the speaker imagines the sages standing in “holy fire,” a vision he likens to a depiction of those sages on “the gold mosaic of a wall.” Gold’s luminous beauty creates a sense of visual splendor that symbolizes the invisible presence of the divine. In art, then, gold is used to render holiness visible and thereby enable viewers to connect to the presence of God. By envisioning the sages as they might appear in a gold mosaic, the speaker creates a clearer mental image of his addressees shrouded “in God’s holy fire.” This image in turn allows the speaker to ask the sages to emerge from their otherwise invisible holy fire, and to facilitate his spiritual transcendence by becoming “the singing-masters of my soul.” Additional references to gold appear in stanza 4, where the speaker imagines himself transforming into a golden bird sitting on a golden bough. Here, the speaker envisions the completion of his spiritual transformation into the quasi-holy “artifice of eternity” (line 24).

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