"Byzantium" was first published in W.B. Yeats's 1932 collection Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems. In it, an unidentified speaker enters the city of Byzantium, which serves as a place of passage to, and encounter with, the otherworldly. In Byzantium, the speaker encounters the boundaries between life and death, as well as those between nature and art, antiquity and modernity, body and spirit. Like much of Yeats's work, "Byzantium" is concerned with the mystical and the mythological—in fact, the poem frequently references Greek myth.
This is one of two Yeats poems in which the city of Byzantium figures themes of mortality and death: "Sailing to Byzantium," published several years prior, can be read as a companion to this later and more formally unconventional poem.
Yeats uses a meter of his own invention for "Byzantium." While each of the poem's five octaves incorporates primarily iambic pentameter, other meter types—especially trochaic and iambic trimeter and tetrameter—create a feeling of disruption and surprise. The same can be said of the work's unusual AABBCDDC rhyme scheme.
