Byzantium

At night in the city of Byzantium, “The unpurged images of day recede.” The drunken soldiers of the Emperor are asleep, and the song of night-walkers fades after the great cathedral gong. The “starlit” or “moonlit dome,” the speaker says, disdains all that is human-”All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins.” The speaker says that before him floats an image-a man or a shade, but more a shade than a man, and still more simply “an image.” The speaker hails this “superhuman” image, calling it “death-in-life and life-in-death.” A golden bird sits on a golden tree, which the speaker says is a “miracle”; it sings aloud, and scorns the “common bird or petal / And all complexities of mire or blood.”
 
At midnight, the speaker says, the images of flames flit across the Emperor’s pavement, though they are not fed by wood or steel, nor disturbed by storms. Here, “blood-begotten spirits come,” and die “into a dance, / An agony of trance, / An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve,” leaving behind all the complexities and furies of life. Riding the backs of dolphins, spirit after spirit arrives, the flood broken on “the golden smithies of the Emperor.” The marbles of the dancing floor break the “bitter furies of complexity,” the storms of images that beget more images, “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.”