Sharma, K.N. "Byzantium by William Butler Yeats: Summary and Poem." BachelorandMaster, 23 Nov. That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea. Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood. The marbles of the dancing floor break little furies of complexity, and those images that beget fresh images and also the dolphin torn, that gong tormented sea.Īstraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood, The blacksmiths of the emperor impose order on these spirits. Sprits sit astride on the dolphins with their mire and blood and reach the beach of Byzantium. Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,Īn agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
The spirits thus purified gain eternal peace.Īt midnight on the Emperor's pavement flitįlames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, There the purgatorial dance of spirit begins and ends in a sort of peace and joy. Here the spirits are purified of all their passions in the flames. No storm can disturb these flames which are begotten of blood (according to medieval belief) or are self-generating. Is it a golden bird or is it something else or is it an unusual bird on starlit golden bough? It can crow like the cocks of hell, or scorn others birds of petals and all the changes which flesh is heir to.Īt midnight on the Emperor's pavement appears a fire which is not fed by fuel or started by striking a piece of iron against a flint stone. I call it death-in-life and life-in-death. Shade more than man, more image than a shade Ī mouth that has no moisture and no breath It is a lifeless image as also an immortal being and the poet calls it death in-life and life-in-death. Night resonance recedes, night walkers' songīefore the poet appears a vision-perhaps a man or shade or a visible ghost of an invisible spirit, a purified spirit which has unwound the coffin cloth and then has cast away its impurities and become a purified spirit. A star studded or moonlit dome of the sky scorns all that man is and all his complexities and the passion and the dross of human life (the violence and decay and impermanence of man's life). The voices of the night become faint the night -walker's song comes to an end, after the sound of the gong of the great Cathedral (St. Sailing to Byzantium is, at its core, a poem concerned with mortality and the frailty of the human body as we age.
The drunken soldiers of the emperor are now asleep. The ordinary gross objects of the work-a-day world go into the background.
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