Quarrel in Old Age
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: Where had her sweetness gone?
In brief
SummaryAfter a bitter quarrel, the poet trusts that her youthful self still lives.
The poet asks where a woman's sweetness has gone. Some trivial rumour or incident, invented by fanatics in a blind and bitter town, has thrown her into a rage. He had forgiven enough, he says, to have forgiven old age itself. The second stanza turns to consolation. Everything that has lived still lives; the old sages were right about that. Somewhere beyond the curtain of these distorting days, the lonely, radiant figure he once saw, stepping out like Spring with her shield, still exists.
Lines to remember
Targeted, trod like Spring.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 8Where had her sweetness gone
The poem opens with a question about lost sweetness. What set her raging was nothing worth a thought, some fantasy or incident stirred up by fanatics in a "blind bitter town". The speaker, who had learned to forgive her ageing, now finds her anger harder to forgive.
Lines 9 to 16Beyond the curtain
He takes comfort from old wisdom: all that has ever lived lives still. Beyond the curtain of distorting days, the lonely figure he first saw remains, armed with a small shield and walking like Spring. Time distorts, but it does not destroy.
Themes
Age and anger
The quarrel shows how politics and age have hardened someone once sweet. The speaker blames the "fanatics" of the town rather than the woman herself, and he admits the strain of forgiving. The poem is candid about how love survives irritation and disappointment in old age.
The lasting self
The second stanza answers the first with a philosophical faith: the past is not lost but lives on beyond time. The young woman he first saw is still real, even if the present hides her. It is a consolation drawn from ancient thought, and it lets him keep his first vision intact.
Context
The poem was collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). The woman is not named, but the poem is usually read as being about Maud Gonne, by then in her sixties and deeply involved in republican politics in Dublin. The final image of a young woman, armed and walking like Spring, fits the way Yeats remembered her from their first meeting and in poems such as "A Bronze Head".
Form
Two eight-line stanzas of short three-beat lines, rhyming ABABCDCD, with near-rhymes such as "gone" and "town". The terse lines suit a mind working through irritation towards calm. The shift from the questions and complaint of stanza one to the steady statements of stanza two mirrors the change of mood.
