When You Are Old

William Butler Yeats was obsessed with aging, making the subject more than just a theme in this poem. Yeats’s preoccupation with aging can be traced as far back as his earliest work, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, in 1889. In “When You Are Old,” the speaker embodies Yeats’s apprehensive attitudes about aging and regret. This is clear from the poem’s beginning, when the speaker states “When you are old and grey and full of sleep” (Line 1)—while the subject of the poem is not yet old, Yeats has already envisioned their future decline. The speaker communicates that the only consolation the beloved will have in old age is that, at one time, the beloved had the speaker’s love. To add a sense of unmoored disconnect from the present, the speaker says, “And nodding by the fire, take down this book / And slowly read, and dream of the soft look” (Lines 2-3). The speaker’s emphasis on the word “dream” (Line 3) creates a sense of wandering and figurative flight, while the phrase “had once” (Line 4) emphasizes the word “dream” (Line 3) and its sense of wandering and flight, because it highlights the fleeting nature of time. This shapes the poem further, as the speaker uses the present tense for “dream” (Line 3) and the past tense for “had once” (Line 4), creating a figurative blurring that blends the future self with the sense of dreaming about the past. This disorientation gives a confused picture of old age, as the beloved seems to barely cling to the present, existing somewhere between the regret of the past and the oncoming surety of death.

Yeats’s poetry also relied heavily on knowledge and embodiment. The fusion of these two concepts in his poetry created two consciousnesses. In “When You Are Old,” these two consciousnesses exist as the past consciousness in the present consciousness. The present consciousness is the speaker remembering, while the past consciousness is the speaker’s awareness of how the past shaped the future and what the speaker and the beloved truly lost. This concept manifests in the second stanza. The speaker relies on the repeated past tense of the word “loved” (Lines 5, 6, 7, 8) in each of the second stanza’s lines. Again, Yeats’s apprehension about the aging process emerges. The speaker uses words like “sorrows” (Line 8) and the phrase “your changing face” (Line 8) to note the passage of time on the beloved but assures the addressee that “one man” (Line 7) loved them despite these changes.

The third stanza develops a metaphysical tone. It is an embodiment of the self and the soul, and it relies on detachment to distinguish between the two. The concept of self shapes as the speaker describes the beloved as “bending down beside the glowing bars” (Line 9), murmuring “a little sadly” (Line 10). The detachment of the self and the soul forms in Line 10 as the speaker personifies Love and how it “fled” (Line 10). The detachment continues because of the line’s enjambment, “how Love fled / And paced” (Lines 10-11), which carries into the following line. Line 11 begins with the conjunction “And” (Line 11), which joins Love’s actions, and distances the speaker even more. The poem concludes with an implied finality, as well as the complete detachment of the speaker, as Love “hid his face amid a crowd of stars” (Line 12). The speaker implies that Love’s hiding from the addressee is infinite and everlasting.

By the poem’s conclusion, Love’s fleeing and hiding also becomes representative of the truth the speaker must accept: That the past cannot be undone, and the beloved’s past decisions have created their shared reality. The conclusion acknowledges that one’s existence is meaningless if one does not acknowledge truth. This acknowledgement adds to the poem’s metaphysical tone. The final line also solidifies the poem’s cyclical nature, since Love has a “face” (Line 12) not described by the speaker. The lack of description causes readers to again return to the first stanza, where the speaker employs the words “old” (Line 1) and “grey” (Line 1), the poem’s most descriptive elements. The cyclical nature that forms is essential not only to this poem, but many of Yeats’s other poems.

“When You Are Old” establishes Yeats as a different kind of love poet. In the poem, Yeats concentrates on the lover’s role. While the speaker is described by tropes that tap into the image of a quintessential, courtly lover, what sets the speaker apart from other love-speakers is how particular the speaker is in regard to the object. In “When You Are Old,” the speaker does not fixate on the beloved’s beauty of the past. Instead, the speaker sees those qualities as inherent in the characteristics of the aged beloved. In many ways, the unrequited love of the speaker plays into an existing literary trope, as the “one man” (Line 7) has fallen in love with an unattainable other, which creates a commonality with other love-speakers throughout the literary tradition. However, the speaker then defies the courtly love tradition, because historically the courtly lover is an older, married individual pursuing an extramarital affair as a means of expressing passion or desire. Instead, the speaker in “When You Are Old” accepts that the pursuit has ended and the romance never manifested. Nonetheless, Yeats portrays the speaker as a virtuous individual for accepting the beloved’s rejection. Therefore, the speaker deviates from the stereotypes of the chivalric lover which permeates early, traditional literary canons.