William Butler Yeats's "Byzantium" originally appeared in his 1932 collection Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems. In this enigmatic work, an unidentified speaker enters a transcendent, fantastical space—the city of Byzantium. Here he meditates upon death, art, nature, and the divides between spiritual and physical life. The poem, like much of Yeats's work, engages with these themes largely through the lens of mythology. While much of the writer's poetry discusses Irish folklore, this work instead alludes frequently to Greek myth and to antiquity. Yeats packs the work with a wealth of images, creating a mood of overwhelming sensory intensity.
This is one of two poems in which Yeats uses the city of Byzantium to discuss mortality and transcendence. His poem "Sailing to Byzantium," published several years prior, is more specifically focused on the process of aging. It is also more formally conventional than "Byzantium," in which Yeats uses a stanza type of his own invention to create unexpected musical effects. Blending iambic pentameter with other types of meter—mostly iambic and trochaic tetrameter and trimeter—Yeats subverts expectations formally while also offering unexpected imagistic juxtapositions.
