The Poem
“Byzantium” is written in five eight-line stanzas that are, in their metrical precision and complex rhyme scheme, reminiscent of the unique stanzaic patterns of the early nineteenth century odes composed by such English Romantic poets as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. The twentieth century Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats certainly shares many traits with those, and other, nineteenth century precursors. Nevertheless, despite all the intensity of its emotion and the rich intricacies of its imagery, “Byzantium” is hardly the sort of effusive outburst one has come to associate with the ode; the speaker seems to be more engulfed in his vision than in any attempt to share its emotional quadrants with the reader.
“Byzantium” takes its name from an ancient city upon whose site the Roman Emperor Constantine constructed his eastern, Christian capital about c.e. 330. Called Nova Roma, that city eventually became known as Constantinopolis and is the modern-day Turkish city Istanbul. For more than a thousand years the capital of the Byzantine Empire, it was regarded as the premier city of the Western world. While Yeats prefers the city’s older name, there is no doubt that his Byzantium is medieval Constantinople.
As the poem begins, night is falling. The day’s sights and even the night’s sounds draw back, leaving the reader’s undistracted senses free to explore other realms of reality and ranges of experience. Soon it is after midnight. The soldiers’ nightly revelries have ended, although a “night walker,” who may simply be someone out very late or a streetwalker plying her trade, is singing, and in the “great cathedral,” the Hagia Sophia, the gong that calls the faithful to prayer has already rung.
In this dreamy atmosphere, pregnant with mystery and anticipation, “A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains” all that human beings are—human complexities and the “fury and the mire” of human veins. That dome may be the night sky or it may be the dome of the Hagia Sophia. Earthbound in this most worldly of cities, an imperial capital, the speaker reminds the reader of that extreme emblem of power and glory, the boundless heavens that dwarf the scope of the human imagination, let alone human accomplishments, let alone one mere mortal.
As if he, too, has been called to prayer and is inspired by this setting to free his spirit of its sensory limitations, the speaker now has a vision. He cannot be certain if the image he sees is a man or a shade—that is, a ghost—although it is an image apparently so awesome in its reality that it overwhelms him to such an extent that he does not know if he is alive or dead—or what life or death is. Yielding to the strength of his vision, he “hail[s] the superhuman;/ I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.”
The vision increases in its intensity as the darkened physical world all about him is transfigured. He is “seeing” with the mind’s eye—although it would be more proper, given the quasi-religious tone of much of the imagery thus far, to imagine the so-called third eye of the mystic. The reader now sees a golden bird that may be a miracle, a real bird, or a man-made, mechanical bird. The speaker decides that it is a miraculous bird; it is “Planted on the starlit golden bough” and “by the moon embittered.” The imagery recalls the disdainful dome of the opening stanza, for the bird also “scorn[s] aloud” the day’s commonplaces and “all complexities of mire or blood.”
In the fourth stanza, the visionary frenzy increases as the reader is swept up with the...
(This entire section contains 785 words.)
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speaker “into a dance,/ An agony of trance.” Flames are flitting on the pavement. These are not the result of the fires of our physical world, however, but are manifestations of the fire of the spirit. Although they are begotten of blood, those spirits who have finally transcended their physical being—that “fury and mire”—are escaping the purgatorial fires that have cleansed them of their worldliness.
In the last stanza, the vision is fulfilled, and the reader is allowed to see the liberated souls of the dead. “Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,” these souls have breached all those earthly and sensory barriers that in life normally confine one to the prosaic plane of this world. As if on a floodtide that bursts like a fountain up from the midnight streets of ancient Byzantium, the spirits make their journey to the Isle of the Blessed across “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea” that divides the living both from their peace and from the ultimate source of the speaker’s vision.
Forms and Devices
Yeats never abandoned the Symbolist tradition that shaped him as a poet in his youth. Though “Byzantium” is a product of his later years, written well after he had transformed himself into a modernist poet, surely the chief device that gives the poem its other-worldly ambiance is the symbol.
Indeed, in Yeats’s view, only the symbolic can express the highest truths, for symbols are “hints too subtle for the intellect”—that is, they can speak to the deeper and more enduring faculties that are generally categorized as the soul. Furthermore, the symbol can do so with an incredible economy, whereby a series of symbols in the right combination can encompass the sorts of truths that would require reams of philosophical discourse to approximate.
By the same token, Yeats was himself too serious a student and seeker of human enlightenment to trust to the unregenerate dream imagery that often beguiles the visionary poet. Thus all his life he steeped himself in traditional symbologies—ancient Celtic lore; occult symbolism and ritual, including astrology; and, finally, the rich Christian iconography of Byzantine Europe.
Yeats’s studies had taught him that the ancient Romans used dolphins to depict the spirit’s voyage from this world to the next; that the starry dome was symbolic of the soul’s astral destiny in the ancient mystery cults associated with Mithra and Orpheus; that a crowing cock carved on a tombstone was intended to ward off evil spirits and influences; that the Byzantine emperors had mechanical birds that sang to the delight of visitors; that the golden bough signifies that point at which the temporal and eternal mingle their mysteries. Precisely how these and other symbols that Yeats half appropriated and half created combine to form new or larger meanings in his poetry is left, as it should be, to the creative energies of each reader.
