The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins.. .. .. . Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood, Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood, The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea. W. B. Yeats's great celebration of the human imagination, 'Byzantium', 1 of which these are the first and last verses, is concerned with the tension, reconciliation and movement between two types of sensibility, the sensual and the spiritual, that of natural life and that of transcendent symbol, in this poem imaged as 'the fury and the mire of human veins' and as 'bird or golden handiwork. .. of changeless metal'. In it, as Richard Ellmann puts it, 'the teeming images, "that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea", flood up to the marbles of Byzantium itself, where they are at last brought under control by "the golden smithies of the Emperor"'himself, inter alia, an image of (one sort of) poet. 2