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, or dies.
Caught in that sensual music, all neglect
Monuments of unaging 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 enameling
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.
Notes
http://www.nli.ie/yeats/video/sailing_400kbps.asp#sailing
Use this link to see a video of Yeats
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From guest lostatseabutstilllooking (contact)
The poem is not about longing for the past. It's about transcending time and age in the realm of art and dreams. Yeats was an old man in everyday life. In poetry and mythology he inhabited a world beyond wrinkles and bodily decay. Think about the phrase "Gather me into the artifice of eternity". He uses as an example the artifice seen in a Grecian urn which lives on long after the person who made it has died. Keats wrote on a similar theme in, appropriately enough, "Ode To A Grecian Urn" and some other poems I can't remember. -
yeats is clearly creating an atomosphere of longing from the beginning of the poem, showing that the speaker has a longing for the past which no longer exists because of disturbances of change. it is because of the change in the life of the speaker that he wants to return to his city of byzantium because this takes him back to a better time, back to a time when things were more simple. in application to everyday life, one would notice that no one takes change the way that it should be taken, most of us spend more time lingering on the past rather than looking ahead for what the future has to offer. many of us are like this man, if you think about it, everyone of us has a time that we want to go back to.
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