composition analysis

When You are Old

The speaker in William Butler Yeats’ poem, When You are Old, takes a moment to speak to his beloved to tell her that she ought to read a particular book, the very same one where this poem is recorded, when she becomes aged so that she can remember her youth. As the speaker’s beloved reads this book, she will recall all the people who had loved her grace and beauty in the past, whether it was with real or fake sentiments. She will also recall that of all these, there was one person who loved her unreservedly even as she grew old and her looks changed. As the lady thinks back on the memory of this man, she will regret that she missed out on an opportunity of true love for this love did not last. This poem utilizes the themes of love, loss, and regret to communicate the sentiment felt by almost all rejected lovers.

As the poem opens in the first stanza, we are introduced to our speaker speaking directly to a former lover of his. This lover is relatively young as the speaker tells the lady that “When you are old and grey…” implying that she has not aged as yet – there may be time left to reconsider her love choices, one surmises. The choice of words he uses next such as “nodding by the fire” helps us picture an old woman who is so old she can barely stay awake. And “old, and gray” evoke the image of the same woman, this time with hair, eyes, and skin that have lost their color and become dull. At the point that she will be reading this book, she will be weary and likely close to death, and thus the book will remind her of the “soft look” and the “shadows” that her eyes once had. She will recall how her beauty or grace may have aroused in her lovers true or false feelings of love at a time when she had not experienced the rigors or the ravages of time.

As the speaker addresses his muse’s beauty, he remarks that some of those who loved her only valued her beauty, but there was one, himself perhaps, who “loved the pilgrim soul in you.” By pilgrim soul, the speaker could imply that his former beloved was a restless person, though it is likely that he means to say that he loved her very deeply. This is evidenced by the fact that he goes on to say that he even “… loved the sorrows of your changing face” which implies that even as her beauty started to fade, he still loved her. It is in this expression that we see the theme of the fleeting nature of life and love expressed as the superficial love of those who flocked to the beloved is contrasted with that which is deeper and more spiritual.

In the last stanza, the man goes back to the frame of time when his beloved will be old. She is depicted as “bending down beside the glowing bars” and murmuring softly and sadly to herself that “…love fled and paced upon the mountains and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” The muse has withdrawn into a sad life where she has rejected true love and must now live in regret for making that choice. The speaker does manage to confess his unconditional love for her, all the same, when he states that he loved her for the pilgrim soul that she had and not merely because of her appearance. It is no surprise, then, that he compares his love for her to the heavens in the last stanza, and this indicates that he is still purely devoted to her.

The poem’s tone changes in the last stanza where we see regret expressed where in the first two we had a romantic and positive tone going. In conclusion, Yeats indicates in his poem that he loved a woman but was rejected. Even so, he goes on to tell her that she will, in the future, regret not marrying him. This poem resonates with all kinds of people, young or old, as the can relate to what the poet speaks on. For the young, they can stop and think on how they might look like or be when they age, while the old can ponder about how they lived the days of their youth. As such, this poem succeeds in revealing to us the realities of passing time, how short life is, and the importance of love.