Summary
At night in the city of Byzantium, “The unpurged images
of day recede.” The drunken soldiers of the Emperor are asleep,
and the song of night-walkers fades after the great cathedral gong.
The “starlit” or “moonlit dome,” the speaker says, disdains all
that is human—”All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of
human veins.” The speaker says that before him floats an image—a
man or a shade, but more a shade than a man, and still more simply
“an image.” The speaker hails this “superhuman” image, calling it
“death-in-life and life-in-death.” A golden bird sits on a golden
tree, which the speaker says is a “miracle”; it sings aloud, and
scorns the “common bird or petal / And all complexities of mire
or blood.”
At midnight, the speaker says, the images of flames flit
across the Emperor’s pavement, though they are not fed by wood or
steel, nor disturbed by storms. Here, “blood-begotten spirits come,”
and die “into a dance, / An agony of trance, / An agony of flame
that cannot singe a sleeve,” leaving behind all the complexities
and furies of life. Riding the backs of dolphins, spirit after spirit
arrives, the flood broken on “the golden smithies of the Emperor.”
The marbles of the dancing floor break the “bitter furies of complexity,”
the storms of images that beget more images, “That dolphin-torn,
that gong-tormented sea.”
Form
The pronounced differences in “Byzantium” ’s line lengths
make its stanzas appear very haphazard; however, they are actually
quite regular: each stanza constitutes eight lines, and each rhymes
AABBCDDC. Metrically, each is quite complicated; the lines are loosely
iambic, with the first, second, third, fifth, and eighth lines in pentameter,
the fourth line in tetrameter, and the sixth and seventh line in
trimeter, so that the pattern of line-stresses in each stanza is 55545335.
Commentary
We have read Yeats’s account of “Sailing to Byzantium”;
now he has arrived at the city itself, and is able to describe it.
In “Sailing to Byzantium” the speaker stated his desire to be “out
of nature” and to assume the form of a golden bird; in “Byzantium,”
the bird appears, and scores of dead spirits arrive on the backs
of dolphins, to be forged into “the artifice of eternity”—ghostlike
images with no physical presence (“a flame that cannot singe a sleeve”).
The narrative and imagistic arrangement of this poem is highly ambiguous
and complicated; it is unclear whether Yeats intends the poem to
be a register of symbols or an actual mythological statement. (In
classical mythology, dolphins often carry the dead to their final
resting-place.)
In any event, we see here the same preference for the
artificial above the actual that appeared in “Sailing to Byzantium”;
only now the speaker has encountered actual creatures that exist
“in the artifice of eternity”—most notably the golden bird of stanza
three. But the preference is now tinged with ambiguity: the bird
looks down upon “common bird or petal,” but it does so not out of
existential necessity, but rather because it has been coerced into
doing so, as it were—“by the moon embittered.” The speaker’s demonstrated
preoccupation with “fresh images” has led some critics to conclude
that the poem is really an allegory of the process by which fantasies
are rendered into art, images arriving from the “dolphin-torn, the
gong-tormented sea,” then being made into permanent artifacts by
“the golden smithies of the Emperor.” It is impossible to say whether this
is all or part of Yeats’s intention, and it is difficult to see
how the prevalent symbols of the afterlife connect thematically
to the topic of images (how could images be dead?). For all its
difficulty and almost unfixed quality of meaning—the poem is difficult
to place even within the context of A Vision—the
intriguing imagery and sensual language of the poem are tokens of
its power; simply as the evocation of a fascinating imaginary scene,
“Byzantium” is unmatched in all of Yeats.
