Byzantium

The golden bird in “Byzantium” stands for both human ingenuity and the transcendence of the human spirit. The poem’s speaker praises the bird’s ability to outperform other birds, whether from Hades...

Yeats's "Byzantium" contrasts the superficiality of life with the permanence of art. The poem invites readers into the ancient city at night, where human life fades into darkness while art endures....

In the third stanza of "Byzantium" the golden bird's crowing is compared to the "cocks of Hades." This comparison is significant because it alludes to one of the central ideas of the poem, which is...

The significance of these lines in "Byzantium" is that they relate to one of the poem's central themes, the immortality of great works of art. As the bird is mechanical, because it is a work of art...