That is no country for old men.” That’s William Butler Yeats looking back at the world of nature, appetite, and generation as he sails away from it. He loved that world. Yeats was a vitalist and a romantic and thought for a while that his best inspirations came from erotic love, even when (and maybe especially when) that love failed consummation. He seems to have proposed to the woman he thought to be his soul mate, Maud Gonne, at least three times, and when she said no for the third, he proposed to her sister. (Their last name is pronounced Gun. Yeats should probably have taken heed.) Still, Yeats loved being in love and thought that some of his best work came from the flowering that takes place when one is smitten with a beloved.
In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the poem with the line about the country that’s not for old men, Yeats is both rhapsodic and exasperated about “the young in one another’s arms” that he sees all around him. They call up comparison to “the salmon-falls” and “the mackerel-crowded seas”: those lovers are vital, passionate, but they are not quite human either. They’ve become animals, though glorious animals to be sure. Anyway, Yeats is no longer one of them. (At least for the space of this poem.) He’s banished, or self-banished from their world. I find myself chanting the opening lines of “Sailing to Byzantium” to myself on the opening days of classes in the fall. The weather’s warm, the young are in one another’s arms (more or less) on the steps of Old Cabell Hall, the breeze is blowing. Everyone is eighteen or nineteen or twenty. The kids are wearing not too much. They’re lying back—some smoking, some vaping. They are laughing even when their lips are set. This is no country for old men, or for old women, either.
That’s true overall, of course. It’s true in America; it’s true in most of the West. This is not a country for old men. Youth is everything and everything that matters is young. We cherish the new, the novel, the latest, the fresh. We avoid what is fading and faded.
People peak early in our culture. The paradigmatic career is the pro athlete’s or the pop star’s. They flash like comets across the sky, flare madly, burn bright, and then slide downward losing light as they go, until finally they douse themselves in the brine. A few hang on, embarrassing themselves and us with their sagging bellies and plastic reconstructed smiles. They are there to remind us what happens to all things bright and beautiful and new. The former-jock-now-commentator lassoed into his uncomfortable tie, the old rocker in kicky new boots recall to us the glories of youth and the sorrows of age. Getting old is something that one ought to apologize for.
And often the old do. Oh, not in so many words, but they slink and scrape and bend and try their best to admire the latest and praise the new. They’re sorry for having lived so long; they feel they’re in the way. If only the young would indulge them a bit, let them live on with their remaining teeth and pleasures, gratitude would abound. This is no country for old men, or for old women, either. This is the country of the gleaming, chirping, tweeting, twerking new.
But to this rule, there is one exception. Not always, but most of the time it is true. Writers, real writers, often get better as they age. And even if their work declines a little, they can stay strong, keep producing, and keep doing what they love. They aren’t like dust-binned CEOs or sidearm pitchers who have or haven’t had Tommy Johns, or wrinkled race-car drivers, or admen whose careers have been added up by their superiors and found to be a few digits short. No: writers stay in the game until nearly the end, and it is not uncommon for their work to get better as time passes. Writers come in as tyros—skinny batters, easy to fool. Their gloves are bigger than they are. But while others decline from about their thirtieth birthday, the writer keeps growing stronger. He leaves the game more potent than he went in. Put it in physical terms—because, remember, the mind is a muscle. The writer starts with a stripling’s physique. She works and works. She labors on and on. And in early old age, though her physical body may be declining, the body of her imagination is muscular and lithe. She’s gotten better, often a lot, as she’s gotten older.
“That is no country for old men,” Yeats says. And he turns away from “whatever is begotten, born, and dies” and heads out—he’s in a sailing ship, the sailing ship of his imagination—for something else. Which is what? What is the alternative to the life of the burbling new that surrounds him (and every writer in or nearing old age)? Before the opening stanza is over, Yeats offers some outright defiance to the culture of the new: “Caught in that sensual music,” he says, “all neglect monuments of unageing intellect.”
Sensual music—the music of desire is a form of enchantment to Yeats. It casts a spell upon the dancers and it is a lovely spell and it is lovely music, but the music is so strong that one cannot stop dancing. Try it and see. When you’re young, you are always in thrall to desire. You perpetually want something. Most likely it is love (and sex). But all desires may in time become modeled on the desire for love and sex. All desires become similarly fierce, similarly fervid. You want and want and want and when you tire of wanting, you find that the sensual music is not only beautiful but also enslaving. You cannot stop desiring and acting, sometimes foolishly, on that desire. You cannot stop dancing.
Sensual music—it’s so potent that you can dance to it throughout your whole life. When you are very young, you’ll dance wildly. You’ll be giddy, inspired, but also sometimes out of control. And when you’re old, you’ll keep dancing, especially if, as it is in the West now, the music plays as loudly as it does and is as alluring and well orchestrated as it is. You’ll keep dancing even though you’re out of step and you can hardly move your feet and you know you look silly and you are humiliating both yourself and the spirit of old age. But you cannot stop dancing. (I want an iPhone, I need a computer, give me some cash, I want, I want.)
A poet I greatly admire, Jack Gilbert, wrote a volume of poems in old age called The Dance Most of All. And Gilbert’s evocation of the dance would be well understood by Yeats. I’m not going to give it up, Gilbert all but says. Even when I’m old I’m going to keep dancing, keep falling in love, keep being struck with awe, keep moving to the sensual music. He’s going to be like old, old Tiresias in The Bacchae, who when Lord Bacchus comes to town gets out and grabs the thyrsus, sacred to Dionysus, and shuffles his feet to the tambourines and gongs and bells. Gilbert and the ancient seer go in full well knowing what they are getting into. All honor to them. They’ll go out as they came in, to the beat and the melody—to sensual music. But for the old man, and the old writer in particular, there are other possibilities: “Caught in that sensual music all neglect, monuments of unageing intellect.”
Unaging intellect. There are forms in this world that pass away and there are some, a few, that actually last. Yeats wants to leave the sphere of passing things and to dwell if he can in the eternal. He wants to give up on love and love’s music and see if he can find truths that will abide. Are there such truths? Plato told us there are and Yeats could often believe there were, too. In Byzantium, Yeats hopes to make contact with art that will last and maybe to create some, too.
There may not be eternal art; there may or may not be eternal truth. But Yeats feels that though he’s lost some valuable pursuits to old age, other possibilities have opened up for him. He’s not stuck in time and the concerns of the moment, so maybe he’s in a position to create something that will outlast him and will outlast time. He’s optimistic, in other words, about writing in old age.
Most people see old age as sheer loss. Yeats admits that age is loss, but he affirms that there’s plenty of gain to be had, too. For the first time in your life, you’re pulled away from desire, and that hurts. It’s humiliating to be old. You feel the grief of missed pleasures. But old age is also a time when, freed from desire, you can create writings you could not create before.
You need to prepare for this moment. You almost certainly need to do some writing when you are young and make the way ready. But if you’ve developed a discipline, if you’ve learned to read and think as a writer, if you’ve stayed with it despite the vagaries of publication and reviewers and editors and the people in your family and out of it who think you are wasting your time, then old age need not be a time of grief and sorrow. You’re at least partially freed from that “raging madman” that Plato’s Sophocles says held him in bondage through the first portion of life: his desires. And you have time to consort with longer-lasting matters. You have, in other words, something new to write about.
And that is exactly what Yeats—among the greatest of artists in old age—did. In his late seventies and early eighties, Yeats wrote his best poems. In them, he wrestled with what old age took away and what it opened up; he developed new perspectives on politics and culture and money and class and tradition, and of course on love. He felt he was seeing the world afresh. He did not repudiate his past adherence to love, not entirely. He sailed to Byzantium and embraced the monuments of unaging intellect. But sometimes he wished himself away from that place, too. One of his last poems has him foreswearing politics and worldly affairs and pining to collapse in the arms of a beautiful girl who is (ostensibly) much too young for him.
Old age is rich for the writer. It has its singular subjects and it has its particular freedoms. The aged writer can get better as he gets older not only because he knows more and has seen more, but also because a new state of being, the state of being potentially beyond desire, opens up and beckons him. And from that state he can see and feel much that is new and surprising.
Our culture is pitched to youth, and this is almost inevitable. But the old writer has much to tell the young about a life lived beyond the bounds of wanting. He can show them a world that is free from obsessive chasing and grasping, from getting and spending. And he can offer them the chance to take a breath, calm down, and to live there for a while.
Yeats knows what an old man looks like from the vantage of the young. “An aged man is but a paltry thing,” he says. He’s but “a tattered coat upon a stick.” Surely it feels that way sometimes; surely the girl passing you on the street, fresh from the dress shop, can look at you and see nothing at all. One can become invisible. An old man is “but a paltry thing,” a “tattered coat upon a stick”—no face, no body.
But not all the time, no. The old man who is a writer lives not only in the world of what is begotten, born, and dies, but in another world, too. And given the chance, he’ll let you hear about it. For sometimes a soul can “clap its hands and sing and louder sing.” Then the new world, which is the eternal world (maybe), opens up and we live beyond time. Seeing the world with full detachment, but not without humanity: this it seems to me is what a certain sort of wisdom entails. The country of wisdom: that is a country for old men and old women—and also for the young, whom we invite, most humbly and cordially, to join us there from time to time.