West End Extra - Letters to the Editor: Rhyme and reason behind Old Men starring in movie

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West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 25 January 2008

Rhyme and reason behind Old Men starring in movie

• WILLIAM Hall says of the movie No Country For Old Men (January 18): “Strange title, but that's the way it goes.”
The title is from the first line of William Butler Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium: That is no country for old men. The young/In one another's arms, birds in the trees/... etc.
The second stanza has the famous lines: An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing.
Tommy Lee Jones might have inspired the Coen brothers to look to Yeats.
Norbert Hirschhorn
Greencroft Gardens, NW6

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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