The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
This description sets the scene for the poem's portrayal of Byzantium as a passage between the physical, human world and the spiritual, transcendent one. The two groups of people mentioned here represent that earthbound human realm, and their retreat clears a space for the emergence of a stranger cast of characters: spirits, mummies, and gods. Soldiers, firstly, call to mind the physical concerns of the battlefield. They evoke the body, and specifically the body in conflict. Moreover, the military is linked to political conflict, itself a product of the mundane human world. Meanwhile, "night-walkers" can refer to sex workers, bringing to mind yet another role of the physical body, this one sexual rather than military, and commercial rather than political.
I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Here, the speaker expresses one of the poem's foundational ideas: namely, that power, transcendence, and inspiration are found in the convergence of and passage between life and death. The "superhuman" being who is described here literally exceeds the normal state of human existence by freely traversing the boundary between life and death. Indeed, the speaker stresses, the being is able to blend these two realms together, so that living people can glimpse and understand death through its presence. This blend of life and death helps guide the living into the realm of the dead, seemingly attracting and seducing them. As a result, the speaker actually respects and praises this strange, in-between figure.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
This particular syntactic structure is repeated several times in the poem. In the prior stanza, Yeats uses a near-identical list to identify a figure variously as a man, image, or shade. Here, he instead uses it to determine that a birdlike creature is not a naturally-created animal, nor even a result of human artistic labor, but instead a kind of miraculously beautiful presence transcending the boundary between those categories. The incantatory repetition of the various potential descriptors—miracle, bird, and handiwork—helps reinforce the idea that these disparate categories have become inextricably entangled. The bird belongs to more than one of these categories. More fundamentally, none of these categories can exist or have meaning without the others. Therefore, their rhythmic repetition here, in which bird, miracle, and handiwork are given meaning through their proximity to one another, reflects the underlying reality that Yeats aims to depict.
Dying into a dance, An agony of trance,
Yeats's reversal of typical, familiar language is striking here, and mimics the reversal of, and erasure of boundaries between, other familiar categories: life and death, pain and pleasure. The first of these two lines reimagines the limits of the verb "die" by offering a new concept—that of "dying into." In contrast to a phrase such as "dying of" or "dying from," "dying into" recasts death as a step on the way to somewhere new, rather than as a final, inflexible stopping point. The second of the two lines, meanwhile, reverses the expected phrase "trance of agony." This play on standard word order lets us know that we are in a realm that is connected to, and yet in many ways unmoored from, the conventions of the everyday.
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
The two types of material described here represent two contrasting categories. The "marbles of the dancing floor" are the polished, perfected products of human artistic achievement. This is reflected in their form: while marble comes from nature, in this case it has been shaped by humans. Moreover it is inflexible, clean, and hard. This contrasts with the "bitter furies" that Yeats describes, which are earlier identified, more specifically, as a mixture of blood and "mire," or swampy mud. These materials are natural, unembellished, and disorderly. When the marbles break through these "furies," therefore, it symbolizes the interaction and conflict between manmade artistic creation and natural complexity.
