"When You Are Old"

We are going to deal with a poem called “When You Are Old”, written in 1893 by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). It was published in “The Rose” (1893). The theme of the poem is the unrequited love.

The poem has three quatrain stanzas. All of them with the same rhyme structure (ABBA). It has true rhyme: “sleep”/ “deep”; “book”/ “look”; “grace”/ “face”; “true”/ “you”; “bars”/ “stars”; “fled”/ “overhead”. They have ten syllables written in iambic pentameter. So, the structure is: unstressed > stressed >unstressed > stressed, etc. “when / YOU / are / OLD / and / GREY / and / FULL / of / SLEEP”.

The first two stanzas of the poem are soft and slow. Yeats is talking about the future, where he describes an old woman sitting near the fire. She is sleepy, because she is “full of sleep”, and “nodding by the fire”. We feel a peaceful atmosphere because of the pleasant words such as “full of sleep”, “nodding by the fire”, “slowly read”, “soft look”, etc. The reading of these stanzas results slow and calm: it is due to the punctuation. Yeats introduces commas in order to decelerate the reading. He tries to produce the feeling of peace and calm that precedes death.

In the second stanza, the poet asks the woman to look back in time, when she was beautiful and everybody was in love with her (just physical attraction). However, one man loved not only her body, but also her soul (even both would change): “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”. This stanza, as the first one, sounds very soft and tender. In this case the effect is due to the vocabulary used: in each verse appears the word “loved” as the main verb: many people loved her glad grace and her beauty, while he loved the pilgrim soul and the sorrows of her changing face.

The third stanza changes dramatically the pace of the verses. It causes impact on the reader. After the peaceful and tender description of the first stanzas, the poet reveals how this love was never returned. It is a sad passage, because both the poet and the woman are sad due to the fleeing love. “And bending down beside the glowing bars,” / “Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled”. She murmurs, so she speaks to herself aloud, maybe she is alone. She is sad, so she is repentant, because now, she is alone and near death, and nobody loves her. In the last two verses we can read: “And paced upon the mountains overhead” /“And hid his face among a crowd of stars.” They make reference to the fleeing Love that goes far from them, to an unreachable place: the sky. As we said before, in this last stanza, the pace of the verses changes. Another factor that produces this effect is the lack of almost all punctuation and the introduction of conjunctions such as “and”. This produces agility and vigor to the text.

To sum up, the main idea of the poem is the unrequited love. It is a kind of warning to her loved. The poet looks forward in time to show her how regretful she will be if she rejects him. He reaches his target in the third stanza, after two peaceful stanzas, where all the emotional impact is condensed.

This poem is really close to Yeats life. In fact, almost all the love poems deal with his own life and his platonic love: Maud Gonne. He met her in 1889, and after that, his life changed completely. She was an Irish actress and revolutionary. He fell in love immediately for the rest of his life. Maud Gonne was one of the most beautiful women of Europe. She had a strong influence on him; in fact, she inculcated all his patriotism and the Irish Revival. However, Gonne did not return his love and married Major Mc Bride, a common friend. Some years later, Gonne’s daughter rejected him too.

It seems evident that this poem is dedicated to Maud Gonne, as a prediction of her future regret. He thinks that now she is beautiful and everybody is in love with her. However, the poet is the only one that loves her in body and soul, even if she would change (physically or mentally). So, Yeats recurs to the future to show how with a psychical change she would be alone (because of the false lovers).

Óscar Fernández Adriá

Bibliography:

“Poem Of The Week”, 16/03/2006, editor@potw.org

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw12.html

“The literature network”, 16/03/2006, 2000 - 2006 Jalic LLC

http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/937.html

“123 Help me”, 16/3/2006, Salley Gardens, help@123HelpMe.com

http://www.123helpme.com/assets/2621.html

Academic year 2005-06
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Óscar Fernández Adrià
Universitat de València Press
osfera@alumni.uv.es