Summary
The speaker catches sight of another object, wondering whether it is a miracle, a bird, or a piece of human handiwork. They conclude that, regardless of which other category it fits into, it is above all a miracle. It sits on a golden branch, starlit, crowing like one of Hades' own rooster companions. Or, made cynical by the moon, it can react scornfully to everyday flowers and birds—which are entangled with the reality of the body—since it is made of unchanging metal.
At midnight, the city's pavement is lit up by flames, but these are no ordinary flames. They don't need wood and steel torches to come to life, and they aren't suppressed by storms. In the flames, spirits come to dance, participating in an intense, trancelike ritual that brings them to a place between life and death.
The speaker then describes how the spirits ride dolphins through the blood and muck of bodily existence. But the Emperor has smithies—places where metals are forged—and the products of these smithies successfully keep this flood of earthly materials at bay. Meanwhile, fragments of the marble floor where the spirits once danced rise up through this sea. The sea, the dolphin-riding spirits, and the marble reinforce and inspire each other in an unending cycle.
Analysis
By this point in the poem, certain patterns in Yeats's meter have had time to set in and affect the poem's mood. Years uses a fairly unpredictable and certainly unconventional meter. In the first three lines of each stanza, the poem uses iambic pentameter, the most common English meter. This creates a momentary lull of familiarity, not only because the meter is commonly used, and not only because Yeats allows it to span three full lines in a row, but also because iambic pentameter has a generally unobtrusive effect. Its ten syllables per line are neither long enough to sound breathless nor short enough to sound abrupt. However, the fourth line of each stanza is shortened from ten syllables to—variously—seven or eight, creating a sense of disruption and suddenness. Moreover, Yeats often alters the stress pattern in the stanza's fourth line—for instance, emphasizing the first, third, and fifth syllables rather than the second, fourth, and sixth. However, the fifth line of each stanza is once again written in iambic pentameter, giving readers a momentary feeling of the return to normalcy. This normalcy is dramatically disrupted by line six, which, in each stanza, is dramatically short compared to what has come before, usually coming in at six syllables. The following line—each stanza's seventh—is also around six syllables. The eighth and final line of each stanza returns us to the iambic pentameter with which we started. Through this pattern of lulling readers into a seemingly predictable pattern, breaking that pattern, and then returning to it, Yeats helps convey the sheer strangeness of this poem's setting—the way that, in Byzantium, the materials and routines of everyday life are distorted beyond recognition.
In terms of the poem's thematic content, Yeats turns a corner in the poem's second half. Stanza one has presented a binary split, with the earthly, bodily, and human on one side, and the spiritual, artistic, and mystical on the other. Stanza two described an object or creature with the ability to cross between these realms. Starting in the third stanza, Yeats begins to plumb the areas of crossover between these two seemingly disparate arenas, exploring how essentially interconnected and yet opposed they are. First, in the third stanza, comes his description of a strange, beautiful birdlike creature. The speaker has trouble sorting it into either of the two established categories: is it a natural object or an artistic creation? Yet it is this very ambiguity that causes it to be labeled a "miracle." Just as the "superhuman" creature of the previous stanza is praised for its ability to encompass "death-in-life and life-in-death," this object is praised for its ability to straddle the space between "handiwork" and "bird." What this seems to suggest is that, paradoxically, the most beautiful art is that which can mimic nature—and the most beautiful products of nature are those which resemble art. At the same time, part of the object's power comes from its ability to "scorn" living, earth-bound bodies: art here aspires to be like a living body even as it looks down on living bodies. Meanwhile, stanza four describes a situation that is at once intensely embodied and free from the usual strictures of embodied existence: it details a ritualistic dance, but the flames surrounding the dancers are vaguely supernatural, and the dancers themselves are mere "spirits."
In the poem's final stanza, Yeats knits together these opposed realms and states once and for all through the image of dolphin-riding spirits. Dolphins themselves embody the coming-together of the body and the spirit. They are often associated with Hades and the underworld in Greek myth, and yet are also living, natural animals. These spirits ride through a landscape that represents the cyclical, mutually reinforcing nature of the body and the spirit. The sea in which they travel is filled with "mire and blood," a phrase that by now has come to stand in for the entirety of the earthly and bodily realm. At the same time, that sea is broken up by the marble of the floor on which the spirits dance, which represents the manicured, ornamented nature of artistic creation and spiritual aspiration. These two materials converge into a single surreal landscape, which is itself kept in place by the Emperor's smiths—in other words, by a deliberate work of artistic creation. The convergence of art and nature, spirit and body, "fresh images beget." That is, in conjunction with each other, the symbols of these two realms have the power to inspire an artist. In the poem's final lines, the poem itself is revealed as the product of just such inspiration. It is a work of art that is brought about through the shared power of art and nature.
