"Old Men"
Many Long Years Ago (1945)
Context: People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.
“I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”
“Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.”
Act V, scene i.
All Fools (1605)
“Men grow old, but they do not ripen.”
Les hommes vieillissent, mais ne mûrissent pas.
Source: Notes sur la vie (published posthumously 1899), P. 103; translation p. 380.
“People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.”
"Old Men"
Many Long Years Ago (1945)
Context: People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.
Source: The Mis-Education of the Negro
“Old men must die, or the world would grow mouldy, would only breed the past again.”
Becket, Prologue, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“Young men, hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young.”
“Young men," said Cæsar, "hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young.”
Cæsar Augustus
Roman Apophthegms
“That is no country for old men.”
St. 1
Cf. Nelson Algren's later, "That was no town for the aged or the aging."
The Tower (1928), Sailing to Byzantium http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1575/
Context: 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 unaging intellect.
