When You Are Old
WHEN you are old and gray 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 among a crowd of stars.
The softness of this poem is like a whispered prayer, a confidence or meditation. Yeats uses assonance, those tender soft vowel sounds throughout the poem, offering up time’s passage to the reader in the palm of the poet’s hand. We do get old the voice suggests, but the value of our being and spirituality may also be innate to our maturity and fraility.
Regret is acknowledged only because denial is not part of this reflective, open response to life’s looming curtailment. The panoramic loves of youth yield to the singular avowal of the special, revelatory love, where the subject has been known as a ‘pilgrim soul’ a recognition perhaps of the higher purpose of intimacy and the way in which love may make a better person of us after all.
A magical, tender poem.
A spiritual embrace before we leave?
