In this poem Yeats stresses particularly the mutual dependence of the changeless, perfect world of Byzantium and the mortal world of "all that man is . . . The fury and the mire of human veins." "Byzantium" exploits the same contrast as its predecessor, but what existed as a rather ambiguous implication in "Sailing to Byzantium" becomes the central issue here.

"Byzantium" apparently began in 1930 when Sturge Moore objected that the last stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium" was a disappointment, "as such a goldsmith's bird is as much nature as a man's body especially if it only sings like Homer and Shakespeare of what is past or passing or to come to Lords and Ladies." Within two weeks Yeats entered in his diary a "Subject for a poem. April 30th," which places this city about 450 years later than Justinian's Byzantium of the first poem, hence further into the antithetical phase:

Describe Byzantium as it is in the system towards the end of the first Christian millennium. A walking mummy. Flames at the street corners where the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees, in the harbour, [dolphinsl offering their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry them to Paradise.

By mid-June he had the first full version, completed the revisions in September, and in October wrote to Moore that the poern originated in his criticism, which had "showed me that the idea needed exposition." The drafts show more rapid and confident progress than the long tinkering with "Sailing." The ideas had been in his head "for some time," and several images—especially the Great Dome of St. Sophia and the dolphins carrying souls from one world to the next—had been reluctantly dropped from the earlier poem. He chose a stanza form that he had already mastered in "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," section II of "The Tower," and "A Prayer for my Daughter," and proceeded with speed and assurance.

There has been a prolonged debate about whether "Byzantium" is a description of Purgatory (or what it feels like to believe in Purgatory) growing from Book III of A Vision, or an image of art and analogue to the process of creation, refining the dross of experience and violence of nature into the perfected work. It is neither necessary nor desirable to choose since Yeats would allow for both interpretations: the perfection of art adumbrates eternity; eternity expresses itself through art. One of his central impulses attempts to link his speculations about eternity with his rare moments of epiphany, and analogues with the Romantics—Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats—inform both poems. In notes for A Vision he said that we attain Unity of Being ("the point in the Zodiac where the whirl becomes a sphere") "always in the creation or enjoyment of a work of art, but that moment though eternal in the Daimon passes from us because it is not an attainment of our whole being." "Byzantium" enacts such a passing attainment. It is aesthetics and escatalogy, and history and psychology as well. Reversing the perspective of "Sailing to Byzantium," the speaker has journeyed to and now stands in Byzantium, the ideal city, which is also a poem, and eternity, and his own mind.

Title--The "holy city" of "Sailing to Byzantium " seen here as it resists and transforms the blood and mire of human life into its own transcedent world of art

The first four stanzas describe the spirit world of Byzantium, and how the mortal becomes immortal.

The first three stanzas give three images of the relation between the superhuman and the human: 1) first, the dome of the cathedral rims above human complexities, "disdaining" them through transcendence; 2) second, the ghostly image links the living speaker to life; 3) third, the goldern bird on the golden bough, similar to the figure of the last stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium" beyond death.

The fourth stanza pictures symbolically the midnight moment of aesthetic transformation.

Yeats gives the final stanza over to images, as one critic puts it, "not only of the eternal world, but also of the world of nature which is feeding it." This reminds us ogf the endless life of the body and the emotions out of which the transcendent images of art are begotten.

Stanza I.1-8: In stanza one the poet appears to distinguish between two meanings of the word "image." The unpurged images--these day-time images--which the poet so immediately dismisses, are apparently the ordinary objects of experience which make up the external world. They represent Plato's appearances combined with Blake's London and recede from consciousness at the sound of the gong of St. Sophia whose great dome is an emblem of art and transcendence. It is either starlit or moonlit so it can be associated with Phase One or Phase Fifteen, the full embodiment of Primate or Antithetical being, saint or artist, absorption into the universal or realization of the Self. It disdains ordinary life and nature because of its achieved perfection of form and its release from the cycles of tirne. Only at the end of the poem do we learn that they are made of the same stuff as the night-time images.

Such images seem at first to be far removed from life, since they are identifiable neither with the living man nor his ghostly substitute.

4—Cathedral: Sancta Sophia.

5--a starlit or moonlit dome According to Yeat's ystem in A Vision (1925) the first "starlit" phase in which the moon does not shine, and the fifteenth, opposing phase of the full moon represent complete objectivity (potential being) and complete subjectivity (the achievement of complete beauty). In between these absolute phases lie the evolving "mere complexities" of human life

Stanza II.9-16: In the second stanza

9-10: the speaker summons one of the night-time images, his guide, Virgil to his Dante, a spirit or mosaic figure, man/image/shade. But how may the poet grasp these images as he must do if his poetry is to go below the superficies of day? Yeats answers with two powerful affirmations. The first completes this stanza

11-16: The soul comes from the underworld and eventually returns there until its rebirth. In life it winds up the mummy cloth of experience, a funereal term used because in the poem life is paradoxically regarded as a surrender of the soul's freedom and therefore as a kind of imprisonment or death. On returning to Hades the soul unwinds the cloth—"the winding path" of nature—like a bobbin unwinding threat But, says the poet, even during life, at moments of "breathless" inspiration, we escape from ourselves and our past and summon the deathless, lifeless image which "has no moisture and no breath." From the point of view of this life, such images are dead; but from a more detached vantage-point, it is they that are immortal, anxl the living who have no genuine life.

11: Hades' bobbin is the soul

11-12 The shade, like the Daimon, winds up experience in life and unwinds it in the stages between death and life.

12-unwind the winding path Unwinding the spool of fate that leads from mortal death (Hades, the realm of the dead in Greelt mythology) to the superhuman

14 breathless because out of time as the speaker is breathless with ecstasy and anticipation.

16 "I call it death-in-life and life-in-death" invokes both Phase One and Phase Fifteen and the Heraclitian formula reiterated so often in A Vision and again at the end of The Resurrection.

Stanza III.13-24: In the third stanza he contemplates another super-human image--the bird he had imagined in "Sailing to Byzantium." But by ecstatically defining it as "miracle, bird, or golden handiwork," he locates it more precisely in the world of art. It is more fully perfected and released, with none of the ambiguity and poignance of its predecessor; eventhough he thinks of it as having a bird's shape, it is so etherally and formally distanced that it need only "scorn aloud" the "mere complexities" of human "mire and blood," that is, either crow like the Cocks of Hades or scorn other birds and life.

20--the cocks of Hades crow To mark the transition from death to the dawn of new life. Yeats had learned from Eugenie Strong's Apotheosis and After Life that the cock, as herald of the sun, became 'by an easy transition the herald of rebirth" on Roman tombstones. Since in this poem he accepts reincarnation, he is distinguishing here between the birds that sing the common strain of the continuing cycle of human lives and those that scorn the cycle and sing only of escape from it; here were the two directions of his own art.

Stanza IV.25-32: The fourth stanza follows in which a sudden revelation of the process by which such images are hammered out, by the Byzantine smithies of the imagination, into their purest form: The speaker enters the refining fire of Purgatory and the imagination. It is the rather terrifying "antique dance" of "Rosa Alchemica" or of the Noh play mentioned in Per Amica and again in A Vision, the "girl in a Japanese play whose ghost tells a priest of a slight sin, if indeed it was sin, which seems great because of her exaggerated conscience. She is surrounded by flames, and though the priest explains that if she but ceased to believe in those flames they would cease to exist, believe she must, and the play ends in an elaborate dance, the dance of her agony." "'We have no power,"' one of the spirits in the Purification told Yeats, "'except to purify our intention,' and when I asked of what, replied, 'Of complexity."' The fires of Purgatory and of aesthetic transformation are not material, but they cause both agony and simplification through intensity.

These images, begotten by the living, have to be immortalized by fire. Some aspects of their perfected state are clarified in notes which Yeats made for A Vision two years before writing Byzantium:

At first we are subject to Destiny . . . but the point in the Zodiac where the whirl becomes a sphere once leached, we may escape from the constraint of our nature and from that of eternal things, entering upon a state where all fuel has become flames where there is nothing but the state itself, nothing to constrain it or end it. We attain it always in the creation or enjoyment of a work of art, but that moment though eternal in the Daimon passes from us because it is not an attainment of our whole being. Philosophy has always explained its moment of moments in much the same way; nothing can be added to it, nothing taken away; that all progressions are full of illusions that everything is born there like a ship in full sail.

By equating the perfection of the afterlife with every metaphysical perfection the philosophers have conceived and with the perfection of art wrought "in nature's spite," Yeats avoids mere estheticism and justifies the description in "Byzantium" which treats the passage of the spirits of the dead to the other world and their purification there as synonymous with the purgative process which a work of art undergoes. These processes are among those which Yeats makes equivalent and symbolical of one another.

But the fires of the imagination have a characteristic which distinguishes them from the fires of this world: they burn and do not burn. They are all-powerful to purge images of any experiential dross, but impotent to singe a sleeve. In a position of prominence in the poem, the last line of the above stanza, Yeats casts one of the many backward glances in his poetry directing it here towards the life of action that the spirit or image is transcending. At the very moment that he heralds the purgative process, he reminds us that the purgation can occur only outside action, for there it has no power.

Stanza V.33-40: The perspective of the fifth stanza dramatically changes as Yeats pictures, he said in a lecture, "the ghosts swimming, mounted upon dolphins, through the sensual seas, that they may dance upon its pavements." The stanza is built around that Yeatsian word "break," and the syntax is tricky. The most persuasive reading is that the marbles created by the Emperor's golden smithies break or purify the bitter furies, and their images, and the new images created by them, the sea of mire and blood through which the souls pass and which the poet regards with new energy and awe. "Suddenly," Helen Vendler has said, "in a dazzling syntactical victory, the resolution, so unforeseeable, is accomplished: the two kinds of imagess purged and unpurged, are not hostile but symbiotic." The poem ends not with a rejection of the "real" messy world for an impossibly—or intolerably—pure state, but a moment of poise between two whirling gyres and two states of consciousness, when "whirl becomes sphere." It returns the perspective to the close of "Sailing to Byzantlum" and rescues the poem from something close to both incomprehensibility and inhumanity. Until this startling and marvelous moment, "Byzantium," for all its scenic and oratorical power, has been static, the geomety of A Vision rather than the drama of Yeats's reckless, passionate encounter with experience. The desire to elucidate the idea for Sturge Moore almost drove him into a radical separation of nature and art. But other impulses were at work as well. In a note for Words for Music, Perhaps, in which the poem first appeared, Yeats said that after an attack of Malta fever, "I warmed myself back into life with 'Byzantium.'" Here, at this moment, staring at those surging dolphins and raging seas, images of enormous evocative power on their own and which also recapitulate "Those dying generations—at their song,/ The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas," poem and poet live.

The same reflection causes him, at the end of the poem, to express not his admiration for the completed work, as might be expected, but his wonder at the spawning images, covered with the mire of experience, in which the work began: Ecstatic before the perfection of the creative process, the poet still yields a little to the fascination for the imperfect and unpurged images not yet arrived at Byzantium.

33-Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood A dolphin rescued the famous singer Arion by carrying him on his back over the sea. Dolphins were associaled with Apollo, Greek god of music and prophecy, and in ancient art they are often shown escorting the souls of the dead to the Isles of the Blessed. Here the dolphin is aIso flesh and blood, a part of life

In this poem, then, the natural and spiritual are inseparable; one can never be entirely abandoned for the other. While the language of the poem suggests an aesthetic emphasis, every kind of spiritual and intellectual transcendence is implied at the same time.

"Byzantium" is too explicit about how it might feel to be "out of nature" not to be profoundly disconcerting.

17-40: The poet imagines the city's deserted streets and courts at midnight ("The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed") and finds in the gold rnosaics of their walls and floors images of the "superhuman" state he seeks: