Alllusions

I assume that the allusion of the title of No Country for Old Men is to W. B. Yeats’s poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”:

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Though I would have liked to master Yeats during college, that ambition went the way of many things I would have liked to do but apparently didn’t want to do enough, for I never did come to understand in any comprehensive or terribly deep way his symbols.

That said, the poem seems somewhat inappropriate for the film, as it speaks of an alluring and golden world of youth, a mythological metropolis, an Eden of sensuality that is glimpsed in the Cohen film only by its absence from the landscapes or the characters’ hearts. The Tommy Lee Jones character, Sheriff Bell (the sound that begins the plot of “The Pardoner’s Tale,” (some four hundred lines after the formal beginning) come to think of it, is the ringing of bells) is surely, “An aged man … but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick,” his body surrounded by “dying animals,” and bound to be one itself. But his soul does not clap its hands and sing, seems not to know how to begin to find what it used to be. It is no country for old men, but all he has as models are the old men, all of them now gone. Sheriff Bell hears the alarums of war, hears the knell of death, and has not the lust or life or sight of Heaven or Faery or whatever it was that Yeats saw still and desired, even as he was writing his Last Poems:

Politics

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

Thanks, by the way, to a man named Schmoo for reprinting this poem, one of my favorite by Yeats. I am in bed next to my sleeping wife and didn’t want to get up to find the book, then have to type it out. A few varied Google searches brought me to Schmoo, and thus the poem gets printed a second time online. (Hmm – Last Poems probably means a publishing date of 1939, which means it’s been 69 years, which might mean it still belongs to someone – so, if I should not have this posted, please let me know and I’ll remove it.) Sorry for the haphazard ending to the post.