William
When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and
full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take
down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of
the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their
shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of
glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love
false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim
Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your
changing face;
And bending down beside the
glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love
fled
And paced upon the mountains
overhead
And hid his
face amid a crowd of stars.
Source:
http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/937/
First of all, I want to explain
what my paper is going to be about. I am going to analyze a poem written by
William Butler Yeats, who is one of the greatest English-language poets of the
20th century that we have studied in class.
Focusing on
the title, “When you are old”, we can think about two different points of view.
On the one hand, we can think that the poem has been written by an old person,
who has lived a long life and has a lot of things, experiences and advices to
tell to other people. A life lived by a person who has a large number of experiences
on the back. On the other hand, we can imagine a young person writing thoughts
and feelings this person has. This point of view is the one of a person that is
imagining and thinking about the future, the own future, how one will be
physically or sentimentally, and how the future life will be. After reading the
poem, one can realise that the correct point of view from the two imagined is
the first one.
If we pay
attention, we realise that the main idea of that poem is to remember all the
life, the best years, the best moments, the love and the person who have been
loved. That poem is a group of memories of a good life; moments, people and
feelings are remembered.
With respect
to the form of that poem, the reader cannot differentiate stanzas or spaces.
All the verses start with capital letters, and the only full stop in the poem
is in the last verse, at the end of the poem. But, if we look at the poem
slowly, and fixing our eyes on the form of the poem, we can see that the poem
is divided by punctuation marks. At the end of the fourth and eighth verses
there is a semicolon. So, it means a break longer than a comma, shorter than a
full stop, but just the break to differentiate parts in the poem.
Physically,
that is to say, what we see written in paper, is a poem composed by twelve
verses, each one having ten syllables. But, if we do not read the poem some
times, one after the other, the punctuation marks cannot be seen easily.
Another way
to differentiate the three parts of that poem I s the rhyme. The rhyme in this
poem is ABBA-CDDC-EFFE. We can observe three parts, three stanzas different one
from the other. The verbs in the poem are different, too. We can see the
present simple tense, in the three first verses: ARE, READ and DREAM; and in
the tenth verse: MURMUR. We see the present participle, in the ninth verse:
BENDING DOWN. The rest of the verbs as HAD, in the forth verse; LOVED, in
fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth verses; and HID, in the twelfth verse. I think
it is important to say that the verbs in the second stanza, verses five, six,
seven and eight, are the same: LOVED. That is a way to call the attention of
the reader, and it is interesting that the poet has written it consciously. Why
not in the first stanza, or the last? It is the second stanza, the middle of
the poem, where the verbs are the same in each verse.
The effect on
the reader can be either positive or negative. The happiness of having lived a
beautiful life, full of love and friends and, on the other hand, the sadness of
being ancient, an old person who has lived the life, that life has passed and
will never come back again, that death is near and you cannot return to those
happy times.
While reading
the poem, the reader can see images as an old person, a grandpa, who is in his
rocking chair, reading a book, his own diary, which was written when he was
young.
I found this
poem as a reflection of life; here the poet wants to reflect the life of
somebody, maybe his own life, but we do not know it, this could be true. I
realized that one of my first impressions when reading the title of the poem is
true. What the poem is about is an old person remembering the life, what you
have been living for and the people you have had around.
It is a good
poem, easy to read, because of the simple vocabulary it contains, and because
it was written to be understood: the form and rhyme are simple; and the poet
with this poem is telling a story that every person could live, a reflection of
our own life, so the reader feels identified with the poem, and, when
identifying with something or somebody a person understands better every thing.
Bibliography:
The literature Network
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