20 Things You Didn't Know About No Country For Old Men
10. Yeats' Poem
No Country For Old Men gets its title from one of the works of Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The first line of Yeats’ poem ‘Sailing To Byzantium’ includes what would become the title of the book, and later the film.
The first verse reads:
“That is no country for old men. The youngIn 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”
The poem describes a man from an older generation feeling lost and left behind by the youth that now inhabit his world. This is similar to the story of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country For Old Men as he struggles to catch up with, or even understand, the path of destruction that has been left by Chigurh and Moss.
Towards the end of Yeats’ poem, the ‘old man’ seems to question what is left for him in this life and what awaits him, if anything, in the next. This part of the poem likely inspired the final monologue from Sheriff Bell as he realises he has become one of the ‘old men’ that the poem refers to.