I haven’t met many people who agree with me, but I love November, with all of its bluster and early-winter sunsets, its long quiet nights. The year is winding to a close, and the days start to feel closer to some sort of homecoming, to reuniting with loved ones and to resting at the end of a long day. The year has grown older, and I think somehow November is the month where I feel closest to all of the versions of myself that I’ve been before. Another eleven months older, another year gone by, and I’m looking once again to return to the same warm feeling of security that I reached for at eight years old. 

At the same time, November brings a hollow ache; a month of yearning for something that may not even exist anymore, amongst deep chill and five o’clock darkness. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats writes “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is; and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity” (21-24). My old, dying heart doesn’t know what it is anymore, attached to the blind and mortal vehicle of my body. Aged, it doesn’t know what it is anymore. 

To throw away the shackles of old age, and claim eternity would be to sacrifice your heart. The pain of feeling – of longing unfulfilled – seems like it may prove fatal in the end. For the speaker, does eternity mean the inability to grow old, or does it refer to their wish for a lasting legacy? Either way, this idea of unending time is an “artifice;” to relinquish any mortality for the sake of eternity is a deception in itself. What does eternity mean without a heart?

The poem begins with the words “That is no country for old men” (1). My old heart doesn’t know what it is anymore; it doesn’t belong in this country any longer. The old doesn’t belong, but it is filled with the tenderness of having lived– something that is directly antithetical to the cold illusion of forever. To know that we are growing older is to feel most strongly the fatigue in our hearts and the fragility of our bones, but the sharpest shards of emotion are still proof of life.