Byzantium Essay Questions

Analyze this poem's meter, using a single stanza as an example.

In each stanza of this work, W.B. Yeats uses iambic pentameter as a rhythmic anchor, intermixing various other metrical patterns to create a sense of temporary and stark departure from the norm. This feeling of the normal and everyday being disrupted suits the poem, which thematically explores the convergence of normal earthly existence and otherworldly spirituality. The poem's second stanza offers an example: its first three lines are written in iambic pentameter, consisting of five two-syllable iambic feet. Yet the fourth line pivots to trochees and consists of seven rather than ten syllables. While iambic pentameter appears again in line five, line six again disrupts it by using trochaic trimeter. The following line returns to iambic meter, but maintains the trimeter of line six. However, the stanza closes out with iambic pentameter in the eighth and final line, once again anchoring it.

Explicate the phrase "mire and blood" as it is used in this work.

Yeats uses "mire and blood" as a shorthand to represent the everyday world of human bodies and physicality, in opposition to the mysterious underworld of spirits, death, and the mystical. In fact, the phrase uses synecdoche, employing two objects that are elements of embodied existence in order to describe this realm as a whole. While "mire" refers to swamp or mud, and therefore represents the natural world, "blood" represents specifically the body. Moreover, "more" calls to mind messiness and complexity—"complexity" in fact being another word used in this poem to describe the physical world—while "blood" evokes violence and interpersonal strife. Through these two nouns, therefore, Yeats is able to quickly conjure an entire interconnected web of associations, all having to do with various aspects of the physical world and life within it.