The Facebook page for "No Country for Old Men" asks:
Did you know that the title is part of the first line from William Butler Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium"?
 |
| Screen shot from the film (image credit) |
Yes, I did. "Sailing to Byzantium" is WB Yeats' stirring poem, as he speaks to aging, rails at our physical frailty as a "dying animal," and romanticizes immortality as a golden bird.
Byzantium was to become Constantinople, now Istanbul. Presumably "no country for old men" is Ireland, where Yeats is from, and Turkey is the country he romanticizes. Apparently Yeats never traveled to Turkey, but it clearly stirred his poetry in a stunningly beautiful way!
What I cannot seem to find is how (or even if) the novelist Cormac McCarthy was influenced by Yeats' poem. There are some parallels between the novel and poem, especially on aging and some brutal imagery, but otherwise they're radically different works of art.
In this video, I recite this breathtaking poem.
No comments:
Post a Comment