From 'Oedipus at Colonus'
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I
II
III
IV
Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryA bleak chorus of old age: better never to have been born.
The last poem of the sequence "A Man Young and Old" is Yeats's version of a chorus from Sophocles' play Oedipus at Colonus. It tells the "travel-wearied aged man" to accept whatever life God gives and stop remembering youth, since every delight breeds "Death, despair, division of families", as the blind beggar Oedipus and his children know. It sets a noisy wedding procession beside the "silent kiss" of death, and ends on the old Greek saying that it is best never to have lived, and second best to leave quickly with "a gay goodnight".
Lines to remember
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 3Advice to the old
The chorus speaks to a "travel-wearied aged man": take the life you are given and ask for no more. Memories of youth only hurt. When every other longing is hopeless, the one delight left is the longing for death.
Lines 4 to 6Where delight leads
Even the delights that memory treasures are the root of "Death, despair, division of families". The proof is Oedipus himself, "that old wandering beggar", and his "God-hated children", born of his unknowing marriage to his own mother.
Lines 7 to 9Wedding and death
A wedding crowd fills the "long echoing street" with torchlight and "tumultuous song". Against that noise the speaker praises another kind of kiss, the "silent kiss" of death, which ends every life, short or long.
Lines 10 to 12Never to have lived
The last part gives the old Greek wisdom plainly: best never to have been born at all. The second best is to leave life quickly, and the light phrase "a gay goodnight" makes death sound like slipping away early from a party.
Themes
Old age
The poem is spoken to an old man, the end point of the sequence it closes. It asks him to give up "the delights of youth" and "ask no longer span". There is no comfort in memory here: what memory treasures is exactly what caused the pain. Age is a time for endurance, not fond looking back.
Death as release
Death is not feared but welcomed. It appears as "death-longing", then as a "silent kiss", then as "a gay goodnight". Each image is gentler than the last, so the grim claim that "Never to have lived is best" arrives in a tone close to cheerfulness. The bleakness is spoken calmly, almost with relief.
Context
The poem closes "A Man Young and Old", a sequence of eleven poems in The Tower (1928) that follows a man from first love to old age. Its title marks it as a translation. Yeats made his own version of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, the play in which the blind, exiled Oedipus comes to Colonus, near Athens, to die, and this is one of its choruses.
The saying in part IV, that it is best never to have been born, is an old Greek commonplace, and Sophocles gives it to his chorus of old men. The companion sequence in The Winding Stair, "A Woman Young and Old", ends the same way, with a chorus from Sophocles' Antigone.
Form
Four numbered parts, each a single three-line stanza held on one rhyme ("so", "grow", "know"; "say", "day", "away"). The lines are long and uneven, some stretching to seven or eight beats, which gives the verse the loose, chanting feel of a Greek chorus rather than a song.