A Man Young And Old 6 His Memories - Analysis

Hiding the self as if it were a relic

The poem’s central claim is bleakly intimate: the speaker feels that age has turned him into something both sacred and unwanted, a kind of damaged exhibit that should be kept out of view. The opening wish, We should be hidden from their eyes, doesn’t sound like modesty so much as shame mixed with a priestly idea of separation. He describes himself and those like him as holy shows—objects meant to be looked at, but not touched—yet their bodies are broken like a thorn in the cold bleak north. The holiness here has no comfort; it’s a frostbitten sanctity, closer to exposed nerve than to blessing.

That sense of being unseen sharpens when he thinks of buried Hector and the fact that none living knows. Hector, a name heavy with heroic reputation, becomes a figure for what time does: it buries the very things that once seemed permanently known. The speaker’s own past—his deeds, his passions—now feels like that burial: real, once consequential, and yet sealed off from the living world’s recognition.

Women’s indifference as an insult to memory

The second stanza pivots from public forgetting to personal dismissal. The women take so little stock / In what I do or say lands as a complaint, but it’s also a confession of dependency: he wants to matter to them, to be weighed and valued. Instead, they’d sooner leave their cosseting / To hear a jackass bray—a deliberately ugly comparison that makes their indifference feel like ridicule. His bitterness is pointed: it isn’t only that they don’t love him; it’s that their attention can be stolen by something crude, while his words carry no purchase.

And yet he can’t stop translating himself into an image of wounded beauty. He repeats the thorn—My arms are like the twisted thorn—but adds, And yet there beauty lay. The contradiction is the poem’s engine: he insists he is misshapen, hurt, weathered, and still he believes beauty once lived in that very damage. The thorn is not just a sign of pain; it is a place where desire once caught and held.

The third stanza’s turn: from grievance to a single scene

The final stanza snaps into a specific memory, and the tone changes from social complaint to charged recollection. The first of all the tribe lay there suggests a first lover, but also turns women into a category—a whole tribe—as if his disappointments have made him generalize. Still, the remembered woman is vivid because he frames her through epic consequence: She who had brought great Hector down / And put all Troy to wreck. Whether or not this is literal myth, it tells you what he needs the memory to be: not a small private affair, but a force with the destructive grandeur of Helen’s beauty, the kind that topples cities.

Then the poem narrows to the body: That she cried into this ear. The closeness of ear matters—this is not a distant legend but an intimate whisper. Her line, Strike me if I shriek, is startling because it makes pleasure inseparable from violence, consent braided with threat. It also echoes the earlier thorn: desire here is not soft; it is barbed. In the speaker’s memory, intensity is proved by how near it comes to harm.

A troubling question the poem won’t let go of

If the present is a world where women would rather hear a jackass bray than listen to him, does he rescue himself by making the past harsher, more extreme—turning tenderness into a scene that can compete with Troy? The memory’s violence risks being less an erotic detail than a strategy: a way to guarantee the past still feels powerful enough to answer the humiliation of being ignored.

What the thorn finally means

By the end, the thorn has gathered the poem’s whole emotional logic: it is the speaker’s body in age—twisted, broken, exposed to the bleak north—and it is also the proof that beauty once lodged in him, painfully, memorably. The poem doesn’t resolve the tension between sanctity and bitterness, or between desire and cruelty. Instead it leaves the speaker in a harsh kind of reverence for his own past: he can’t make himself lovable now, so he makes himself unforgettable in memory, even if what he preserves is sharp enough to draw blood.