When You Are Old
When You Are Old - context Summary
Addressed to Maud Gonne
Written for Yeats’s 1893 collection The Rose and believed to be addressed to Maud Gonne, the poem imagines a future moment when the beloved is old and remembering youth. It contrasts many who admired surface beauty with one speaker who loved the beloved’s inner "pilgrim Soul" and enduring sorrows. The tone is elegiac and tender, framing love as lasting yet tinged with regret and distance.
Read Complete AnalysesWhen you are old and grey 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 amid a crowd of stars.
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