First stanza

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.

As a literal paraphrase, the first stanza consists of the speaker describing his former country, a place that is not oriented toward the aged. Here, youthful denizens embrace one another, perhaps in young love (I.2). The birds, termed "dying generations" (I.3) by the speaker, perch and sing in the trees. Lines four through six repeat a similar combination of the natural world and the natural cycle of life and death; rivers and streams teeming with fish, with birds circling above, and all life recognizing and accepting that all that which is born must die. With the closing couplet of the first stanza, the speaker summarizes why he mentions these observations about the natural world. This world of circulating life and death blinds the enraptured mortals from the immortal realm of the artistic and spiritual.

Most of the first stanza describes a romantic picture of the natural world. The simple images of the "young / in one another’s arms" (I.2), birds singing (I.2-3), and the lively seas (I.5) are filled with a bright vitality, yet a conflict frames this seemingly beautiful world. Before even mentioning the young, the speaker proclaims, "That is no country for old men" (I.1). Closing the frame, the speaker calls the world nothing but "sensual music" that distracts people from the eternal things in life (I.7-8). Yeats uses the word "caught" in line seven to describe the trap-like nature of the natural world. Its luring qualities must be recognized and resisted so as to focus on things the speaker believes to be of much greater consequence. These mysterious things are objectified as "monuments of unaging intellect" (I.8), conjuring images of majestic man-made objects that outlive their creators.

The speaker’s described country may also be Yeats’ Ireland. Encyclopædia Britannica writes, "[The poem] is grounded in literal meaning as well, for in 1924 the ailing Yeats left Ireland, 'no country for old men,' to view Byzantine mosaics in Italy". Yeats' mentioning of the salmon falls and the mackerel seas is also interesting because while both are images of fertility, the act of salmon swimming upstream may be interpreted as an act against nature, defying the natural flow of water. The salmon are a metaphor of the speaker who desires to resist the forces of the natural world; he explains his desire in the next stanza. On the other hand, the salmon may be a metaphor for the entirely natural desire to create. After all, it is only the mature salmon who leave the "mackerel-crowded seas" to make their way into fresh water rivers, make the hazardous voyage into rocky, shallow streams to find their place of origin, reproduce, and then die. It is a perfect metaphor for the aged artist, moving upstream, as it were, back to artistic sources in the East to produce or find inspiration for his own kind of progeny, art.