Byzantium Literary Elements

An unidentified individual who is implied to bear a similarity to the poet himself.

Five octaves, written largely in iambic pentameter with some lines exhibiting trochaic stress or written in tetrameter and trimeter. The poem follows a loosely AABBCDDC rhyme scheme.

A creature is compared through simile to "the cocks of Hades." Dolphins breaking the surface of water are, through metaphor, described as tearing the surface in the phrase "dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea."

Alliteration appears in the following phrases:
"resonance recedes"
"dome disdains"
"Hades' bobbin bound"
"Flames that no faggot feeds"
"singe a sleeve"
"Break bitter furies"

Assonance appears in the following phrases:
"Nor storm"
"An agony of trance"

Yeats here explores the ironic relationship between art and nature, in which art aspires to mimic nature and yet can exceed it in beauty. Similarly, the immortal and spiritual realm is both free from and inextricably tied to the earthly, living one. In both cases, the situation produces situational irony by bringing to light unexpected relationships between seemingly opposite situations.

Lyric Poetry

The ancient city of Byzantium

Entranced, beguiling, solemn

The poem has no clear protagonist or antagonist

The poem's major conflicts are between ideas and states—death and life, art and nature, modernity and antiquity—rather than between people.

The poem's climax comes in its final stanza, when Yeats describes the way that fantastic images prompt new imaginative images in an unending cycle.

The poem's first line, in which "images of day recede," foreshadows the upcoming foray into murky, mysterious territory, since day and light generally signify clarity and normalcy.

Yeats designates the "image" and "miracle" in understated ways through the sentences "Shade more than man, more image than a shade" and "More miracle than bird or handiwork." By offering these definitions indirectly, through comparison, Yeats creates understatement.

The poem alludes to the history of Byzantium, also later known as Constantinople or Istanbul. It contains several allusions to Greek myth, and in particular to Hades, the Greek god of the underworld.

The phrase "mire and blood" is repeatedly used as synecdoche to represent physical and embodied existence, with mud and blood serving as two representatives of the physical.
The phrase "A mouth that has no moisture and no breath" also uses synecdoche, in this case to represent death: the mouth of a dead body stands in for death as a whole.

The domes of Byzantium are described as showing disdain while the "mouth that has no moisture and no breath" is imbued with the agency to summon others.

The description of "All that man is" being "fury and mire" is hyperbolic, as is the description of metal as "changeless"—in both cases, Yeats describes something in absolute terms for rhetorical, emphatic effect.

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