A Prayer for Old Age
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1934. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2030, and this site is served partly from American servers. So for now we give the notes without the full text; it will appear here in 2030.
It begins: God guard me from those thoughts men think
In brief
SummaryAn old poet prays to stay foolish and passionate rather than wise.
A short prayer against dry wisdom. Yeats asks God to protect him from thoughts thought in the mind alone: a lasting song comes from deeper down, from the bone. He would rather not be the wise old man everyone praises; for the song's sake he would sooner seem a fool. Prayer is back in fashion, he notes wryly, so he prays that, though he dies old, he may seem a foolish, passionate man.
Lines to remember
Thinks in a marrow-bone;
A foolish, passionate man.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Thinking in the bone
He asks God to guard him from thoughts made in the mind alone. Anyone who writes a song that lasts thinks "in a marrow-bone": from the body and the depths of the self, not from abstract reasoning.
Lines 5 to 8Not a wise old man
He also asks to be kept from everything that makes a wise old man whom all can praise. Who is he, he asks, not to seem a fool for the sake of the song? Respectability is a danger to poetry.
Lines 9 to 12A foolish, passionate man
With a dry aside that prayer is coming round again, he makes his prayer: that even dying old he may seem a foolish, passionate man. The last line is the whole poem in small.
Themes
Old age and passion
Yeats refuses the usual role of the old: calm, wise, admired. He wants to keep the heat of youth, and to seem "passionate" to the end. The same defiance drives other late poems, where he asks for an old man's frenzy or calls lust and rage his spur.
Body and mind
The poem sets thought "in the mind alone" against thought in the marrow-bone. Lasting art, for Yeats, comes from the whole person, flesh and instinct included. Wisdom that is only mental is sterile; the fool with a song is closer to truth.
Context
The poem was printed in the preface to The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries and Poems (Cuala Press, 1934), and collected in A Full Moon in March (Macmillan, 1935). Yeats was then nearly seventy. His late poems often argue against a serene old age, and this one belongs with "An Acre of Grass" and "The Spur" in praising an old man's passion.
Form
Three quatrains of short lines, mostly alternating three or four beats with two or three, rhyming on the second and fourth lines, with some half rhymes ("all" and "fool"). The plain, hymn-like shape suits a prayer, and the short lines keep it light and quick.
