A Man Young And Old 10 His Wildness - Analysis

Leaving the world by climbing into weather

The poem’s central urge is flight: the speaker wants to be told to mount and sail up there into cloudy wrack, as if weather could serve as a private country. That request isn’t just romantic escapism. It reads like a need for altitude and distance from ordinary social life—an older self trying to get above the mess of attachment and disappointment. The clouds aren’t soft; wrack suggests torn, driven scud, so the desired refuge is turbulent, not serene. His wildness is not youth’s energy but a later-life refusal to stay grounded in what has thinned out or soured.

There’s also a hint of dependency in O bid me: he can imagine escape, but still wants permission, an external voice to authorize what he privately wants to do. That small neediness sits under the grand gesture of sailing away.

When love turns into inventory: Peg, Meg, and Paris

The speaker names what he’s leaving behind in a strangely mixed list: peg and Meg and Paris’ love, a jumble of the everyday and the legendary. Peg and Meg feel like ordinary women recalled by nickname, while Paris’ love gestures toward the mythic glamour of Helen—love as world-historical catastrophe. By placing them together, the poem suggests that memory doesn’t sort by importance; it stacks the personal and the epic on the same shelf. What matters is not their rank, but what they had: a straight a back, a bluntly physical detail that reduces romance to posture, youth, and presence.

Then comes the hard accounting: some are gone away, and some that stay / Have changed their silk for sack. The line doesn’t just mean people aged or grew poorer; it makes change feel like a costume swap—from seduction and social sheen (silk) to penitence or hardship (sack). The tension is sharp: the speaker longs for what’s lost, yet what remains is altered so drastically that it can’t be loved in the same way. Memory preserves the silk; time insists on sackcloth.

A private cry that still wants an audience

The second stanza turns inward, and the poem’s emotional light changes. The conditional Were I but there suggests that the sailing-away is as much fantasy as plan. He imagines being where none to hear—and immediately imagines making a sound: I’d have a peacock cry. The contradiction is the point. Even in chosen solitude, something in him must proclaim itself. A peacock’s cry is not pretty; it’s harsh, startling, and performative. It’s the call of display without the comfort of being understood.

He justifies it as instinct: natural to a man / That lives in memory. Memory becomes a habitat, not a faculty—a place he lives, and therefore a place that shapes his voice. If you live in memory, you keep re-announcing yourself to what is no longer there, calling out across an emptiness you helped create by leaving.

Nursing a stone: tenderness without a recipient

The most haunting image arrives at the end: Being all alone I’d nurse a stone / And sing it lullaby. It’s absurd and heartbreaking at once—care offered to something that cannot respond. The stone can be read as the dead weight of the past, or as the speaker’s own hardened heart, or simply as the blunt fact of loneliness. Either way, the gesture is maternal: nursing, lulling, soothing. His wildness contains a strange gentleness, but it has nowhere to land except on what is inert.

This is where the poem’s tenderness sharpens into bleak comedy: he can’t stop loving, so he assigns love to the unliving. The lullaby answers the peacock cry—one is a raw announcement, the other a soft ritual—and both happen when no one is there. The speaker’s inner life keeps performing intimacy even after intimacy has vanished.

The risky comfort of memory as a home

The poem quietly asks whether living in memory is a kind of freedom or a kind of exile. The speaker wants to rise into cloudy wrack because the world of Peg, Meg, and Paris’ love has either disappeared or transformed. But the refuge he imagines is populated by noises and rituals that prove he still needs attachment: a cry, a lullaby, an object to nurse. In that sense, the poem’s wildness is not mere rebellion; it’s the last, stubborn energy of desire trying to survive after its proper objects have gone.