Death and Life
The speaker describes Byzantium as a kind of portal between life and death. In Byzantium, the lines between ghosts, visions, and living humans become blurred. Moreover, the spaces where people pass from a state of life into one of death are visible and legible. The shroud of a mummy becomes a path to the underworld, and spirits dance in flames that cannot harm them, so that they embody and encounter death without danger. In this depiction, neither death nor life is particularly inspiring on its own. Instead, it is the tension and transition between the two categories that captivates the speaker. The ability to move between these realms allows for a transcendent experience that is at once ecstatic and agonizing. Moreover, it is only through movement between these realms that the "mire and blood" of embodied existence can coexist with the disembodied spiritual plane, producing a cycle of inspiration and beauty.
Art and Nature
Throughout this work, the speaker struggles with the paradoxical relationship between the natural world and the artist's depictions of it. This paradox is most evident in the poem's description of a bird. On the one hand, its beauty stems from the fact that it appears to be crafted by humans, which allows it to look almost scornfully at the unpredictable natural world. On the other hand, the artist's depiction has no meaning and no inspiration without the source material of nature: a real bird and a real branch are essential parts of creating an artistic rendering of a bird and branch. Ultimately, the speaker concludes, the link between art and nature is cyclical. Nature inspires art, which improves upon nature, continuously. Even this very poem, the speaker suggests, has earned its rich imagery out of this fruitful but perplexing cycle of imitation.
