The Full Text of “Byzantium”
The Full Text of “Byzantium”
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“Byzantium” Introduction
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"Byzantium" is Irish poet W.B. Yeats's meditation on the relationship between mortality and immortality, the physical world and the spiritual world, and humanity and art. In this complex, mysterious poem, the speaker's visions of the sacred city of Byzantium trace a "winding path" that leads from messy, emotional human life to the serenity and perfection of great art. Art, the poem suggests, is paradoxical: even artworks that seem to touch immortal perfection need to be made by mortal human hands. Yeats first published "Byzantium" in his 1930 collection Words for Music, Perhaps, and Other Poems.
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“Byzantium” Summary
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The speaker paints a picture of the ancient, almost legendary city of Byzantium. Here, the dirtied, not-yet-purified visions of the daytime world fade away. The Emperor's drunk army has finally gone to bed; the sounds of the nighttime city are fading, and the songs of the people walking the streets (or perhaps the sex workers) fade away beneath the sound of a ringing church bell. Above these streets, soaring domes lit by the stars or the moon seem to look down scornfully on humanity—on people's silly complications, all their rage and their messiness.
The speaker sees a vision that could be a man or a ghost—but no, it's more like a ghost than a man, and more like a vision than a ghost. It makes the speaker think of a spool of mummy bandages, wound up by Hades (the Greek god of the Underworld): that spool, unwinding, will form a path toward another world. This vision's dry, mummified, unbreathing mouth can summon living mouths to follow it to the land of the dead. The speaker honors this mummified figure as an image of something more than human. It unites death with life and life with death.
Now, the speaker sees what seems like a miracle, a bird or a golden sculpture—but no, it's more like a miracle than a bird or a sculpture. Sitting on a golden branch under the light of the stars, this bird can crow like one of Hades's own roosters—or, made haughty and cynical by the moonlight, it can mock ordinary, living birds and the living branches of trees: in its unchanging golden beauty, it's above all the mess and violence of life.
In the middle of the night, the speaker says, the streets of the Emperor's city reflect mysterious flames—flames that don't come from burning wood, that were never lit, and that can't be blown out by storms. These flames come only from other flames like them. And in these flames, flesh-and-blood people can escape the mess of human life for a moment, participating in an agonizing, ecstatic dance of death, somehow burning up spiritually in flames that couldn't even scorch their physical sleeves.
A whole crowd of ghosts, the speaker says, ride on the backs of dolphins through seas of mud and blood. But the Emperor's glorious, golden metal-crafting workshops hold these seas back. Marble floors for dancers break through all the mess and complication of human life. The awe-inspiring visions of art create more visions—even the vision of that sea itself, ripped by dolphin's backs and haunted by the ringing of the church bells.
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“Byzantium” Themes
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Art, Transcendence, and Immortality
In this poem (which is a kind of sequel to Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium"), the speaker observes a mysterious world in which art transcends the muck of mortal life, creating everlasting beauty out of mess and death. Imagining a journey through the ancient, mystical city of Byzantium, the speaker marvels at its "moonlit dome[s]" and its golden birds standing on "starlit golden bough[s]"—works of art that are so much more beautiful and eternal than living people that they seem to "scorn" their creators. But without those mortal makers, of course, these artworks couldn't exist! Art, this complex poem thus suggests, is paradoxical: the deathless beauty that art presents wouldn't be there without the "mire" (or muddy mess) and "blood" of everyday life.
Imagining a journey through the streets of Byzantium (the ancient sacred city that once stood on the ground of modern Istanbul), the speaker marvels at the city's glorious art and architecture:
- For example, the city's "dome[s]" rise up to the sky, lit by the moon and stars—as if they belonged more to the heavens above than the earth below.
- A statue of a golden bird standing on a "starlit golden bough" especially catches the speaker's attention. Its "changeless" (or unchanging) "metal" seems infinitely more beautiful and lasting than the regular old flesh and wood of the living bird and branches it imitates.
Art, these reflections suggest, can create a kind of eternal perfection that's far removed from the "mire and blood" of everyday life and death. These artworks are so beautiful and perfect, in fact, that they seem to "disdain" (or look down on) all the everyday life going on at their feet—at the rowdy "drunken soldier[s]" and 'night-walkers" stumbling off to bed.
And yet, it takes messy, mortal human beings to create all that perfect, deathless art in the first place; art can't make itself. Someone had to imagine and build those domes and that golden bird. And the "golden smithies" (or goldsmiths' workshops) where this artistic creation takes place are run by the same kinds of people who are lolling around drunk in the streets even now, and who will one day die.
Immortally beautiful art, the speaker sees, thus has a symbiotic, give-and-take relationship with mortal people. Elaborating on this idea, the speaker envisions a dried-up, mummy-like "shade" (or ghost) and hails it as something "superhuman," containing both "death-in-life and life-in-death." Symbolically, this strange image suggests that people and art give life to each other in turn:
- Like this mummified figure, the artwork of Byzantium preserves something: the visions and ideals of people who are long dead.
- The artworks wouldn't exist without the dead, and the dead's dreams wouldn't go on existing without the artwork.
As the poem ends, the speaker imagines "spirit after spirit" traveling on "dolphins" (as the dead were said to in Roman mythology)—an endless procession of ghosts cruising over seas of mud and blood. But, the speaker concludes, the work of the "golden smithies," the glorious work of artists, can "break" this infinite "flood' of death. "Fresh images" of immortal, heavenly art rise right out of the "mire" of human life.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-40
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The Relationship Between the Body and the Soul
"Byzantium" can be read as an exploration of the relationship between the body and the soul. Wandering the imagined streets of Byzantium, the poem's speaker is fascinated by the contrast between the city's beautiful, spiritual art and the messy, rowdy people who make that art. The speaker also understands that, against all odds, the glory and the mess are intertwined—that they need each other. Read symbolically, the poem suggests that the immortal soul (symbolized by that everlasting art) needs the mortal body. However, it also suggests that people must cast off the "fury and the mire" (the muck and mess) of their mortal lives in order to achieve a kind of spiritual purification in death.
Throughout the poem, the speaker associates Byzantium's art with deathless perfection—a kind of beauty that might call to mind paradise, the afterlife, or the world of the spirit. The city's magnificent domes are "starlit" and "moonlit," reaching for the heavens; its golden bird statues seem like perfected versions of ordinary mortal birds. The works of art, in other words, are ideal and unchanging. And, symbolically, they suggest the immortal perfection of the spiritual world. Unlike mortal bodies, these pieces of art will never age or die.
However, these artworks are surrounded by "mire and blood"—by all the mud, mess, and fleshy limitations of the physical world. The people who live around those domes and golden birds are "drunken soldier[s]" and "night-walkers," fighters and sex workers dealing with the bodily matters of survival and sexuality.
At first glance, the airy, heavenly artworks couldn't seem to have less to do with the human chaos around them. But, as the speaker observes, those apparently divine artworks couldn't exist without human artists. In just the same way, people's bodies and spirits are intimately connected: there's no way to dream of a perfect spiritual afterlife without first living in a human body! The deathless spirit, the speaker thus suggests, needs the mortal body.
The poem's mysterious images of dancers "dying" in a purifying "flame" and a mummy's wrappings unraveling to create a "winding path" also suggest that people can hope to move into a world of spiritual perfection and beauty after death—but only once they’re purified of the "mire and blood" of mortal life. Perhaps the pain and fear of dying, leaving the body behind, are the sacrificial "path" one must take to reach the eternal world of spirit.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-40
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Byzantium”
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Lines 1-4
The unpurged images ...
... great cathedral gong;"Byzantium" begins with a transition: the fading away of the daytime world and the coming of night. In a city that readers can guess must be the ancient Byzantium of the poem's title, the streets are finally starting to quiet down after what sounds like a big evening.
The "Emperor's drunken soldiery," his rowdy soldiers, are "abed" at last, no longer making a ruckus. As a "great cathedral gong" (a mighty churchbell) rings, "night-walkers' song"—the sound of late-night partiers making their way to bed—"recedes."
There's a lot of receding going on here, in fact. "Night resonance"—the sound of the night—"recedes," and the "unpurged images of day recede"—a moment of epistrophe that suggests a general fading and dimming of life in the streets. As the waking world pulls back like the tide, a different kind of atmosphere creeps into the city.
This change might be a purification. If the "images of day" are "unpurged," they're unclean somehow, not yet washed of some unknown taint. That it takes the solemn, holy sound of a "great cathedral gong" to shoo them away suggests a juxtaposition not just between night-world and day-world, but between something sacred and something profane.
Consider, too, just how wide and mysterious the idea of the "images of day" might be. Perhaps these "images" are just the sights and sounds of all those messy drunkards stumbling off to bed. But perhaps the "images of day" are also the way that people see in the daytime in general. The sound of the "great cathedral gong" rings in a different way of perceiving the world, not just a quieter time of night. The poem is on its way to the land of dreams.
Even in these few words, readers may already have a vivid mental picture of the poem's setting. The mere name "Byzantium" summons up visions of an ancient city crowned with temple domes and glittering with mosaics. The "Emperor" who seems to rule here, similarly, suggests a long-ago time; he'd have to be a very distant Emperor indeed, from a time before the Roman Emperor Constantine conquered Byzantium and renamed it Constantinople. The drunken soldiers and night-walkers could come from any time or place, but they’re living in what feels like an enchanted, legendary city.
The chanting rhythms of these first few lines might also put readers under a spell. The first three lines here are written in iambic pentameter—that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, like this:
The Emp- | eror's drunk- | en sold- | iery are | abed;
But this lilting, steady, familiar rhythm breaks in line 4, which both changes its feet to trochees (the opposite of iambs, with a DUM-da rhythm) and shortens to tetrameter, with only four strong stresses:
After | great cath- | edral | gong;
That change in the rhythm mimics just what it describes. The nightlife of the city goes on at a steady iambic pace—until that "great cathedral gong" rings and the whole world changes. Keep an eye on the shifting meter as the poem goes on: it will evoke not just the poem's landscape, but the speaker’s vision of another world, one that just touches our own.
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Lines 5-8
A starlit or ...
... of human veins. -
Lines 9-12
Before me floats ...
... the winding path; -
Lines 13-16
A mouth that ...
... death-in-life and life-in-death. -
Lines 17-20
Miracle, bird or ...
... of Hades crow, -
Lines 21-24
Or, by the ...
... mire or blood. -
Lines 25-27
At midnight on ...
... begotten of flame, -
Lines 28-32
Where blood-begotten spirits ...
... singe a sleeve. -
Lines 33-37
Astraddle on the ...
... furies of complexity, -
Lines 38-40
Those images that ...
... that gong-tormented sea.
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“Byzantium” Symbols
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The Golden Bird
The poem's brilliant golden bird statue symbolizes spiritual and artistic perfection.
Made of "changeless," precious, never-tarnishing gold, this bird is better than any "common bird": it's perfectly beautiful, and it can never die. In fact, it's so sublime that it seems to "scorn" its earthly counterparts. It thus stands for an ideal, the imagined perfect version of an imperfect mortal bird—the kind of spiritual form that, in this speaker's opinion, great art reaches toward.
Note, too, that this bird also appears in "Sailing to Byzantium" (the earlier work to which this poem is a kind of sequel), and plays a very similar role there.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 17-24: “Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, / More miracle than bird or handiwork, / Planted on the starlit golden bough, / Can like the cocks of Hades crow, / Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud / In glory of changeless metal / Common bird or petal / And all complexities of mire or blood.”
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Byzantium
As in its sister poem, "Sailing to Byzantium," Byzantium here symbolizes the ideal, spiritual world of art.
The ancient Greek city of Byzantium is a real historical place, but one with a legendary aura. A seat of many world religions (notably early Christianity), it was renamed Constantinople after the Emperor Constantine (who also declared it the capital of the Roman Empire), and later became modern-day Istanbul. By the time Yeats wrote this poem, "Byzantium" was more a myth than a place. But the ancient city's glorious architecture and mosaic art remains, reflecting a long and mythic history.
In this poem, the city's starlit church domes and golden statuary represent the kinds of spiritual ideals that can only be reached in art. These immortal works lead the speaker to reflect on how human artistry can carry people toward a kind of immortality of their own.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-8: “The unpurged images of day recede; / The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; / Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song / After great cathedral gong; / A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains / All that man is, / All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins.”
- Lines 25-32: “At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit / Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, / Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, / Where blood-begotten spirits come / And all complexities of fury leave, / Dying into a dance, / An agony of trance, / An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.”
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The Shade
The eerie "shade" (or ghost) the speaker hails as "the superhuman" is a symbol of artistic immortality.
The speaker greets this image of a floating, mummy-like figure as "death-in-life and life-in-death"—words that suggest this figure is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive. That in-between situation has a lot in common with both great works of art and great artists. Art, of course, never dies—and the artists who make enduring works live on even after their deaths through their art. (This poem itself, which has outlived Yeats by nearly a century, is a useful case in point!)
Such immortality, however, may come at a cost. Artists who wish to touch this "superhuman" immortality, the mummified figure suggests, might first have to first sacrifice their lives to art.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 9-16: “Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade; / For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth / May unwind the winding path; / A mouth that has no moisture and no breath / Breathless mouths may summon; / I hail the superhuman; / I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.”
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“Byzantium” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Paradox
"Byzantium" is founded on a paradox. In this poem, the real world of mortal human beings and the ideal world of art and spiritual perfection are opposites—but they also rely on and grow out of each other.
This poem's perspective on the world is, in one way, Platonic. That is: like the philosopher Plato, the speaker feels that the physical world is really just a shadow of a perfect spiritual world. The miraculous "bird" of "golden handiwork" that appears in the poem’s third stanza provides a good example of this philosophy:
- This gorgeous statue is linked to the divine: "starlit" and "moonlit," it's symbolically closer to the heavens than to earth.
- In fact, it represents the eternal ideal of a bird, the most perfect bird there could possibly be. For that reason, it "scorn[s]" the "common bird" of imperfect, mortal flesh and blood.
Art, the poem thus suggests, can reach into the world of perfect, eternal images and bring a glimpse of them back to earth. There's a complication here, though: you can't have art without artists, and artists are no more perfect and immortal than that "common bird." They roll around in the "mire and blood" of everyday life with everyone else.
Strangely enough, then, the ideal world comes in contact with the real world through imperfect, messy mortality. Artists and art, the poem suggests, live paradoxical lives, reaching out to touch the divine from the muddy ground where they stand.
The speaker's strange image of a mummified "superhuman" figure suggests that the rewards of such efforts might be a kind of immortality: like this preserved "shade," artists who make great works might reach a kind of immortality. (This famous poem, which has considerably outlived its author, might be read as a case in point!)
Where paradox appears in the poem:- Lines 1-40
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Repetition
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Juxtaposition
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Allusion
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Alliteration
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"Byzantium" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Recede
- Unpurged
- Soldiery
- Abed
- Night-walkers
- Disdains
- Mire
- Shade
- Hades' bobbin
- Embittered
- Flit
- Faggot
- Begotten
- Singe
- Astraddle
- Smithies
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “The unpurged images of day recede;”; Line 3: “Night resonance recedes”)
To fall back or diminish.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Byzantium”
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Form
“Byzantium” echoes its earlier sister poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” but with a difference. Like “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Byzantium” is written in eight-line stanzas (a.k.a. octaves)—five of them, in this case. But while the earlier poem was written in formal ottava rima, this poem is not.
These similarities and differences reflect the evolution of Yeats’s thoughts (and perhaps the speaker’s). In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the speaker, a weary old man, imagines leaving the land of youth behind to make a journey to the mythic city where he hopes to learn immortality from the sages represented in ancient mosaics. The speaker in this poem, speaking from Byzantium rather than planning to embark for it, seems both a little ambivalent about the glory of Byzantine art (which seems to “scorn” and “disdain” mere mortals here, not just transcend them) and a little more ready to explore the connection between the everyday and the eternal.
The same-but-different form of this poem might thus reflect a philosophical development, a variation on a theme.
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Meter
“Byzantium” uses a metrical scheme of Yeats’s own invention. The poem is written mostly in iambs—that is, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. The first three lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter—lines of five iambs in a row, as in line 9:
Before | me floats | an im- | age, man | or shade,
After that, things get a little more complicated. The stanzas start to introduce lines of tetrameter (four feet in a row) and trimeter (three feet), often in iambs but sometimes in trochees (the opposite of iambs, with a DUM-da rhythm, as in “common”), and sometimes in accentual meter, sticking to a regular number of stresses without keeping to predictable feet. The stanzas always close on another pentameter line.
Each stanza, then, uses a pattern that's at once regular (across the poem) and unpredictable (line to line):
- Three lines of iambic pentameter
- A line of tetrameter (as in the trochaic tetrameter of "After | great ca- | thedral | gong")
- Another line of iambic pentameter
- Two lines of trimeter (as in "I hail | the su- | per human")
- And a concluding line of iambic pentameter.
The overall effect is a sense of gathering intensity, vision, and surprise. The longer, more thoughtful pentameter lines seem to evaporate away, cooking down into those short, powerful trimeter lines, then stretching out again at the end of the stanza. This rhythm helps to give this poem its mystical tone, tracing the speaker’s movement in and out of strange, flashing visions.
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Rhyme Scheme
The weaving rhyme scheme of “Byzantium” runs like this:
AABBCDDC
That regular pattern, however, is pretty subtle, almost subliminal: a whole lot of the rhymes here are slant, like “recede” and “abed,” "is" and "complexities," “summon” and “superhuman.” They also cut across the shapeshifting meter, pairing longer and shorter lines. The overall effect is more murky, echoey, and suggestive than orderly and ringing—a flavor that chimes with the poem’s mystical tone.
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“Byzantium” Speaker
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Readers only learn about this speaker indirectly; there’s no hint of this person's age, gender, or circumstances. What the speaker sees and thinks on a visionary wander through Byzantium, though, reveals that they both long for and fear the perfection of art and the beauties of the spiritual world.
The speaker’s awe at Byzantium’s shining domes and golden birds is tempered by a sense of awestruck fear, perhaps even shame. A perfect golden statue of a bird, the speaker feels, must “scorn” real birds for their relative drab imperfection. Only through a series of strange visions can the speaker come to terms with a mystery: art’s perfection needs messy, mortal humanity to come into being. It takes a journey through the “mire and blood” of everyday life to reach the spiritual perfection that art embodies here.
In short, this speaker is an idealist, a mystic, and an artist—and thus not unlike William Butler Yeats himself.
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“Byzantium” Setting
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“Byzantium,” readers might not be surprised to discover, is set in Byzantium, an ancient city renowned for its glorious sacred art. The speaker’s visit there seems more visionary than literal, for Byzantium no longer exists. First, it was renamed Constantinople by the Emperor Constantine; then, it became the modern city known as Istanbul. While many of the Byzantine Empire’s treasures remain in Istanbul, Byzantium itself is only a romantic vision.
That legendary mood perfectly suits the speaker’s purposes. With its timeless population of “soldier[s]” and “night-walkers” and its glittering “dome[s],” the poem’s Byzantium is a symbolic city of the body and the spirit, a place where the mess of everyday life and the perfection of art coexist.
Yeats often returned to an imagined Byzantium in his poems, perhaps in part because of its spiritual history: it was a major seat of early Christianity, with a legacy of glorious mosaic art.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Byzantium”
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Literary Context
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) is widely considered the most influential Irish poet in modern history. He was the central figure of the Irish Literary Revival (a.k.a. the Celtic Twilight), a movement that brought renewed attention to Ireland's literature, culture, and Gaelic heritage during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For his contributions to his country's poetic heritage, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.
He began writing around the age of 17; "Byzantium" was one of his later works, appearing in the 1930 collection Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems. His influences were wide and diverse, including Irish mythology and folklore, the poetry of the English Romantics (Wordsworth, Blake, and Keats in particular) and the writings of the French Symbolists (such as Stephen Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud).
"Byzantium" can be read as a companion piece to Yeats's equally famous "Sailing to Byzantium" (1926). Both poems are the work of an older writer reflecting on his art and the transcendence he's sought through it; of "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats said, "I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul..."
This poem also reflects Yeats's deep interest in mysticism and the occult. The golden birds, starlit domes, and deathless flames of "Byzantium" speak to Yeats's belief in a kind of collective human unconscious (the "Spiritus Mundi"), from which poets could draw cryptic, powerful images and symbols like water from a well.
Historical Context
Yeats was a prominent public figure, the first Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was integral to the Irish Literary revival, which was a key part of the Irish push for political and cultural autonomy. Indeed, Yeats's Irish patriotism was in part the reason why so much of his early poetry is overtly political. "Easter, 1916," for example, was written in response to an (ultimately unsuccessful) Irish uprising against British rule.
By the time Yeats published this poem in 1930, though, he was moving away from political poetry and into a more mystical style. "Byzantium," like "Sailing to Byzantium," is a soul-searching poem of artistic transcendence and heavenly perfection—themes that aren't attached to any particular time, place, or event.
However, even this unearthly idealism had some unsavory political implications: preferring grand national mythologies and overarching philosophical systems to individualistic democracy, Yeats sympathized with the rising fascist governments of the early 20th century.
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More “Byzantium” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Yeats's life and work at the Poetry Foundation's website.
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Yeats's Influence — Listen to a radio program discussing Yeats's complex legacy as an artist and a thinker.
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A Celebration of Yeats — Read an article about the 2015 celebration of Yeats's 150th birthday.
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Yeats's Voice — Listen to a recording of Yeats performing his own poetry and get a feel for his sense of music.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Butler Yeats
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