W. B. Yeats' "When You Are Old" is one the poet's lyrics that qualifies as a love song without the usual Yeatsian political or modernist tinge.
The poem consists of three quatrains with the rime scheme, ABBA, CDDC, EFFE. The speaker is addressing a loved one, yet he speaks from the position of an unrequited lover. The poem may be read as subtle seduction poem.
First Quatrain: “When you are old and grey and full of sleep”
The speaker dramatizes his unrequited love by offering a future command for the addressee to “take down this book / And slowly read.” He projects that his poem will appear in a collection of his published poems. He wants the addressee, after she has become aged and “grey and full of sleep,” to read his poem and think back on his love for her.
He asks her to remember the “soft look / [Her] eyes had once,” but he also wants her to remember “their shadows.” Those shadows alerted the speaker to the fact that his love for her would remain unfulfilled, especially because those shadows were “deep.” The speaker emphasizes the physical condition of the addressee for “when [she] is old,” she will be “grey,” “full of sleep,” and “nodding by the fire.”
Although the speaker projects the poem into the future and imagines that the addressee will read it only in the future, he knows she will read it as a young woman, and he hopes she will reconsider her coolness toward him, accept his love, and not be “nodding by the fire” alone in the future but with him.
Second Quatrain: “How many loved your moments of glad grace”
The speaker then refers to the situation that is galling him, that many more men than he have “love[d] [her] moments of glad grace,” and they have also loved her beauty. But he establishes his uniqueness, again offering a hint of persuasion, by averring that he alone loves the real person she is. He alone can “love the pilgrim soul” she is and, no doubt, will continue to be.
Not only does he understand her because he loves her true self, but he also accepts and loves her when she is feeling moody; he loves “the sorrows of her changing face.” He insists that he is the one who can accept her as she is. He loves her inner beauty as well as her outer beauty.
Third Quatrain: “And bending down beside the glowing bars”
In the final quatrain, the speaker dramatizes the future moment when the addressee will be reading this heartfelt poem addressed to her, and it will make her sad as she bends down to tend to the fire. He foretells that she will “murmur” in her melancholy that “Love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”
She did not accept the love when it was offered to her, and it escaped like smoke that rises and dissipates into thin air. He asks her to imagine his rarefied love, and therefore he himself, slowly walking in the mountains where he seems to vanish among the “stars.” He wants her feel sad now for what she will have lost if she does not recognize and reciprocate his love.
Other articles on Yeats:
- Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: Visions of a Rough Beast
- Yeats’ “Easter, 1916”: On the Easter Rising
- WB Yeats' “Lapis Lazuli”: Analysis and Commentary
