Because it’s Friday afternoon, and because I’m hacked off with copywriting for the day¹, I thought it would be cool to entertain y’all with one of my favourite poems, W.B. Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. The Coen brothers have used its first line for the title of their new movie, No Country For Old Men. (But then you knew that, didn’t you?)

The Coens aren’t the only people to cannibalise Yeats. Back when I taught this kind of thing for a living, every time I deliberately mislaid a policy document or report (i.e., every day, at least twice) I’d tell my Head of Department, the lovely Mr. Ewan Craig, that said document had been ‘gathered into the artifice of eternity’ (l. 24).

Anyway, here goes. Brace yourself, because it’s a corker:

I

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.

II

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.

III

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.

IV

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.

^{1. Because, you know, although copywriting and marketing pay the bills and can be quite good fun, they’re not the end of the bloody world.}