Girl's Song
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1932. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2028, 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 2028.
It begins: I went out alone
In brief
SummaryA girl thinking of her lover meets an old man and weeps.
A girl goes out alone to sing, her mind on a man, and "you know who". Instead she meets another man, an old one leaning on a stick to stay upright, and she sits down and cries. That is the whole of her song. The last lines ask a riddle: did she see an old man who had once been young, or a young man, perhaps her own lover, as he will one day be.
Lines to remember
Saw I an old man young
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Out alone
She walks out alone to sing, thinking of a man she will not name. The playful "you know who" invites the listener into her secret.
Lines 5 to 8The man with a stick
Another man appears, leaning on a stick to keep himself upright. The sight is enough: she sits down and cries.
Lines 9 to 12Old man young
That is all her song. The closing question reverses its terms: was this an old man who was once young, or a young man seen as he will be old. Love and age become one figure.
Themes
Youth and age
The old man with his stick shows the girl what her lover, and she herself, will become. The closing riddle folds youth and age into one figure, a theme Yeats returns to throughout Words for Music Perhaps.
Love's shadow
She sets out singing of love and ends in tears. The poem gives no explanation; the sight of age is enough to cloud her happiness. Its brevity makes the shift sudden, like a mood changing in a moment.
Context
The poem belongs to the sequence Words for Music Perhaps, first collected by the Cuala Press in 1932 and then in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). It is paired with the next poem, "Young Man's Song", which gives the man's point of view.
Form
Three four-line stanzas in very short lines of two or three beats, rhyming ABAB with half rhymes (alone and man, song and young). The song is tiny and plain, like a folk verse, and ends on a question rather than an answer.