Summary
The daytime has faded away, and now, at night, the emperor's soldiers have gone to sleep. The songs of night-walkers—a word that at once suggests people literally walking at night and denotes prostitution—have fallen silent after the ringing of a gong in a cathedral. The city's domes, lit by the stars and moon, look down with apparent disdain at mankind, with its complicated, animalic bodies. The speaker catches sight of a figure, but has trouble determining whether it is a man, a ghost, or a mere imagined vision. In the end, the speaker concludes, it is closest to being simply an image. In any case, it calls to mind a physical object—a mummy, wrapped by Hades himself. This mummy's shroud, unwound, can serve as a path linking the realms of the living and the dead. Its lifeless, breathless mouth has the power to tempt the living into the realm of the dead. The speaker pays respects to this being as a superhuman link between death and life.
Analysis
These first two stanzas establish Byzantium as a kind of passageway—a transitional space between the earthly and the celestial, the mortal and immortal, the dead and the living. The real city of Byzantium in fact works well as a setting for this set of contradictions. Byzantium, located where the city of Istanbul sits today, was the capital of the Byzantine Empire and a meeting place for Asian and European travelers in the ancient world. In a sense, therefore, Yeats is calling to mind a concrete and very mundane location, associated with political power and military might. On the other hand, he chooses a location from the distant past, setting the poem in a lost world, so that the setting becomes mysterious and elusive.
Yeats establishes this sense of Byzantium as a mystical in-between through a series of symbols, which represent the various juxtaposed elements of the city. First come the paired groups of soldiers and night-walkers. These two groups stand in for the earth-bound, bodily reality of everyday life. Soldiers are associated with bodily strength as well as bodily harm, while night-walkers are associated with sex. However, both of these groups, with their links to the life of the body, are gone. Moreover, they have disappeared in response to a gong, which is itself located in a cathedral. Both the gong and the cathedral have ritual significance in various religious traditions, making these objects, in the poem, sites of spiritual and transcendent life within the physical world. In other words, the mundane life of the body has disappeared, and the life of the spirit is now able to fully emerge.
Similarly, the "starlit or [...] moonlit dome" operates as a symbol of the spiritual within the everyday world, albeit in an even more explicit way. Not only are these domes religious objects, suggesting mosques or churches, they are also literally celestial, bathed in the light of the stars and the moon. Here, the conflict between the celestial and the earthly is reiterated. This time, the starlit domes are personified as acting scornfully toward human beings. Specifically, Yeats explains, their scorn is a reaction to the way in which humans are bound to their bodies, which are often unclean and impure. The poem's first stanza, therefore, sets up a stark contrast, and conflict, between these two groups—the neat, clean, elevated world of the spiritual, and the dirty, messy world of the body.
Yet the following stanza quickly sets about complicating this split with the introduction of a creature who seems at once to be a human body, a ghost, and a phantom. This confusion in and of itself helps to blur the lines between these once-clear categories, showing that not every object or person can be neatly slotted into one realm or another. In fact, the strange, mummified being doesn't just cross over from the underworld to the land of the living. It also creates opportunities for others to do so, "summoning" the living into the world of the dead. Perhaps most radically of all, the speaker explains, this being can actually blend these two worlds, rather than merely traverse them or help others do so. This being brings aspects of life into death and vice-versa, blurring an apparently immutable opposition. It is for this reason, above all, that the speaker seems to admire and wonder at the being.
