"Sailing to Byzantium" - drafts of the first stanza

Original draft according to Curtis Bradford:

This is no country for old men – if our Lord

Smiles

Is a smiling child upon his mother’s knees

And in the hills the old gods / Those – I know now

What names to call them by – still hunt and love

There is still a love for those that can still sing

All / For all the

Forever sing the song that . . . you have sung

Original draft according to A. Norman Jeffares:

All in this land – my Maker that is play

Or else asleep upon His Mother’s knees,

Others that as the mountain people say

Are at their hunting and their gallantries

Under the hills, as in our fathers’ day

The changing colours of the hills and seas

All that men know or think they know, being young,

Cry that my tale is told, my story sung.

Third draft via Marjorie Perloff:

This/ Here/ That is no country for old me – the young

Pass by me/ That travel singing of their loves, the trees

Break/ Clad in such foliage that it seems a song

The shadow of the birds upon the seas

The leaping fish, the fields all summer long

The leaping fish/ The crowding fish commend all summer long

Deceiving [?] abundance/ Plenty, but no monument

Commends the never aging intellect

The salmon rivers, the fish/ mackerel crowded seas

Flesh/ All/ Fish flesh and fowl, all spring all summer long

What/ Commemorate what is begot and dies.

Final version:

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.

- W.B. Yeats