"That is no country for old men" is a line from which poem?

"Sailing to Byzantium", a poem by William Butler Yeats, has the line: "That is no country for old men". In the poem, the speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is no country for old men. It is a place full of youth, with the young lying in one another’s arms, birds singing in the trees, and fish swimming in the waters. There, “all summer long” the world rings with the “sensual music” that makes the young neglect the old.

An old man, the speaker says, is a “paltry thing,” merely a tattered coat upon a stick, unless his soul can clap its hands and sing; and the only way for the soul to learn how to sing is to study “monuments of its own magnificence.” The speaker has “sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” The speaker addresses the sages “standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall,” and asks them to be his soul’s “singing-masters”. He hopes they will consume his heart away, for his heart “knows not what it is”—it is “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal,” and the speaker wishes to be gathered “Into the artifice of eternity.”

"Sailing to Byzantium” is considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. Written in 1926, the poem is called Yeats’s definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative spirit required to keep an individual vital even when the heart is fastened to a dying body. Yeats’s solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium.