When You Are Old
W. B. Yeats · 1893 · Three sestets, trimmed hexameter
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.
Meaning
A love poem addressed to the future: Yeats imagines the woman he wanted as an old woman reading about him, and asks her, belatedly, to notice what she missed.
Analysis
The whole poem is staged in the second person and the future tense. Yeats removes himself from the scene entirely — he is not present, only described — which gives the poem its strange mixture of tenderness and accusation.
The central distinction is between two kinds of admirers: those who loved 'glad grace' and beauty, and the one man who 'loved the pilgrim soul in you'. The poem flatters while it rebukes, insisting that her beauty was the least interesting thing about her.
Love becomes a figure walking 'upon the mountains overhead', hiding among stars. That personification is the poem's exit strategy: instead of saying she will regret it, Yeats lets Love itself wander off, faceless and unreachable. The sadness is left unargued, which is why it lasts.
Craft notes for your own writing
- Address a future version of the person you love; time does the emotional work.
- Distinguish between loving someone's appearance and loving their inner life — the distinction is the poem.
- Personify an abstract noun and send it away at the end rather than explaining the loss.