Abstract

W. B. Yeats's great celebration of the human imagination, ‘Byzantium’, of which these are the first and last verses, is concerned with the tension, reconciliation and movement between two types of sensibility, the sensual and the spiritual, that of natural life and that of transcendent symbol, in this poem imaged as ‘the fury and the mire of human veins’ and as ‘bird or golden handiwork . . . of changeless metal’. In it, as Richard Ellmann puts it, ‘the teeming images, “that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea”, flood up to the marbles of Byzantium itself, where they are at last brought under control by “the golden smithies of the Emperor”’ – himself, inter alia , an image of poet