The Wild Old Wicked Man - Analysis

A central claim: choosing the second-best on purpose

Yeats builds this poem around a stubborn, comic-tragic confession: the speaker knows the religious promise of relief, but he deliberately reaches for the human consolation that is available now. The wild old wicked man is not simply lustful; he is making an argument about what a body can bear. He admits that some stream of lightning / From the old man in the skies could, in theory, burn out that suffering, yet he ends by insisting, a coarse old man am I, / I choose the second-best. In other words, the poem doesn’t treat spiritual transcendence as false; it treats it as insufficiently livable for someone who cannot stop being flesh.

Mad about women, mad about the hills: appetite as wandering

The opening couplet yokes desire to landscape: Because I am mad about women / I am mad about the hills. That pairing makes his craving feel elemental—less a private vice than a force of weather and terrain—while the line Who travels where God wills blurs whether he is a pilgrim or simply a man making excuses. Even his wish for death is phrased as a refusal of domestic closure: Not to die on the straw at home. He doesn’t want the tidy end where familiar hands close these eyes. The refrain Daybreak and a candle-end keeps dragging every claim back to a room where night is ending: a liminal time, half-sacred (daybreak), half-debased (a guttering candle), perfectly matching a speaker who can’t decide whether he’s praying or bargaining.

Flattery with an edge: the old man’s weapon is language

When he speaks to my dear, the tone is coaxing but also predatory in its intelligence. He warns her not to withhold, then pivots into a grim thought—Who can know the year... / when an old man’s blood grows cold?—as if urgency itself were a moral claim. His boast is not about looks or strength; it’s about verbal force: Words I have that can pierce the heart. Against that, the young man can only touch. The contrast is cruelly revealing: he treats physical contact as comparatively shallow and elevates his own rhetoric into a kind of intimacy that bypasses consent. The poem lets us feel how seductive that can sound while also showing its violence: piercing is not the same as loving.

The woman’s refusal: love can be neither demanded nor rerouted

The poem turns sharply when she answers him. Her reply is calm, almost procedural: Love to give or to withhold / Is not at my command. That line punctures his idea that her affection is something cleverness can obtain. Then she delivers a reversal that is both comic and devastating: I gave it all to an older man: / That old man in the skies. She redirects the triangle so that the rival is not a younger lover but God. Yet she doesn’t romanticize her choice; she frames it in terms of attention and labor: Hands that are busy with His beads. Prayer occupies her body so thoroughly that it blocks the speaker’s earlier request for mortal closure: those hands Can never close those eyes. The refusal is not only erotic; it is practical. Devotion rearranges what a person’s hands are for.

Seashore, fishermen, the dark: trading piety for earthiness

Stung, he lashes out—Go your ways—and immediately chooses a new scene: Girls down on the seashore / Who understand the dark. The phrase understand the dark matters because it isn’t merely sexual; it suggests a fluency with what religion often tries to outshine: ignorance, fear, impulse, mortality. The images that follow are pointedly unspiritual—Bawdy talk for the fishermen, a dance for the fisher-lads, beds turned down when dark hangs upon the water. It’s a deliberate descent from beads and heaven to bodies and weather. But it’s not simply rebellion; it’s his attempt to find a community where desire isn’t treated as a moral problem to be solved.

A young man in the dark, a wild old man in the light: the split self he can’t heal

One of the poem’s strangest, richest claims is his self-description: A young man in the dark am I, / But a wild old man in the light. Darkness makes him young—suggesting that appetite returns him to beginnings, to risk, to the rawness of wanting. Light makes him old—perhaps because daylight brings social judgment, memory, and the awareness of time’s damage. His swagger turns into performance: he can make a cat laugh, and with mother wit can touch hidden things in marrow-bones, secrets from time long passed away. That “touch” echoes his earlier insult of young men; now he claims a deeper kind of touch, psychic and ancestral. Yet even here there’s contempt—warty lads who only lie by bodies. The tension is that he wants to be praised for depth while also craving the uncomplicated physical world he pretends to scorn.

The universal suffering catalogue—and the poem’s hard honesty

Near the end, his voice expands beyond seduction into something like testimony: All men live in suffering, whether upper road or low, rower or weaver, horseman or child hid in the womb. The list flattens status and age into one shared condition: embodiment itself hurts. This is where the earlier bawdiness looks less like mere lechery and more like a strategy for surviving consciousness. He acknowledges orthodox belief—no right-taught man denies the possibility of divine relief—yet his conclusion refuses heroism. He doesn’t claim enlightenment; he claims respite: I forget it all awhile / Upon a woman’s breast. The phrase awhile is crucial: he is not buying salvation, only a pause.

A sharp question the poem leaves behind

If the speaker is right that suffering is universal, then his craving for awhile becomes almost compassionate—until we remember how he began by trying to talk a particular woman out of withholding. The poem makes us ask: is his second-best a modest human choice, or a way of turning another person into anesthesia? The repeated Daybreak and a candle-end keeps answering with the same bleak compromise: both can be true at once, and morning still comes.