Old Men and New Discoveries

So I was trying, yet again, to like Yeats (I do this almost every year, and always come away frustrated with myself for not having the reaction to his work that I know I ought to) when I came across "Sailing to Byzantium" (which I may have read before and just not remembered, or, more likely, skipped over because I assumed I had already read it). The first stanza stopped me dead in my tracks:

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.

Hello, Cormac McCarthy! Now, before I go on, I have to confess to not having actually read McCarthy's No Country For Old Men. I read Blood Meridian, and I don't know what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn't expecting THAT, and wasn't really sure what to make of the whole experience, which felt sort of like picking up what you think is a sweet, juicy grape and biting into it and discovering it's actually an olive. And it's not that you don't LIKE olives, it's just that - well, you weren't expecting one, so it just tastes all wrong to you, and frankly a little repulsive. I want to read Blood Meridian again, because it deserves another try with a more-prepared mindset. But anyway, the point of all this is that I got temporarily scared of Cormac McCarthy and haven't ventured any further into his oeuvre.

But I did see the movie. So all of my thoughts about why Cormac went to Yeats for his title are solely Hollywood-based. I feel like I would have much more cogent thoughts about it if I had actually read the book; the Random House website blurb for the book notes that Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones' character) serves as the book's "moral center," and that he sees in the books' events "a breakdown in the social order of apocalyptic proportions." His "reflections on the changing world around him, on his values, his family, and his own past give the novel its distinctive richness and moral weight." Looking back on the movie, I can see that about Jones' character, but I'm sure that concept is much more developed in the book.

Back to Yeats. It's sort of ironic that in Yeats' poem the world surrounding the aging speaker is vital and full of life - neglecting the old - whereas in McCarthy's work the world surrounding the "speaker" (if we think of Sheriff Bell as the speaker) is violent, terrifying and rapidly spiraling out of control. The poem shows an old man wishing for an eternal life in the form of art - he wants to be preserved in the "hammered gold and gold enamelling" of the city of Byzantium, forever to "sing/To lords and ladies of Byzantium/Of what is past, or passing, or to come." In McCarthy's work, the desire to be preserved in gold is quite literal, and the wish for the type of eternal life money can offer you comes not out of a need to escape a world that no longer sees you, but out of the need to escape a world that sees you too much.

One last thought - in Yeats' last stanza, he says "Once out of nature I shall never take/My bodily form from any natural thing." Though this is supposed to express a transcendent experience within the poem, that idea takes on another meaning when viewed through the lens of McCarthy's No Country For Old Men. In McCarthy's world, nearly all of the main characters have already fallen out of nature, and their subsequent cloaking with gold is dangerous and demonic. The hearts of McCarthy's men truly are fastened to "dying animal[s]." The artifice of eternity is abysmal and artificial in a very false and misleading sense.

All of this makes me want to read McCarthy. So, even though I still don't particularly like Yeats, at least he's given me my interesting literary thought for the day!