The Coming of Wisdom with Time
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Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryAn ageing man likens himself to a tree that withers into truth.
Four lines built on one image: a person as a tree. Leaves and flowers are many, but they grow from a single root. In youth the speaker showed off his foliage in the sun, and he now calls those days "lying". Age will strip the display away, and he "may wither into the truth": the bare root that was always there. Losing youth, in this view, is also a gain.
Lines to remember
Now I may wither into the truth.
Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Leaves and root
Line 1 sets up the image: many leaves, one root. Youth is "the lying days", spent swaying "my leaves and flowers in the sun", all show and movement. The last line turns withering, usually a picture of decay, into arrival: he "may wither into the truth".
Themes
Ageing
Age usually means loss, and "wither" is a word of loss. Here it becomes a way of reaching something. The young man's leaves and flowers were beautiful but many and passing; the older man is reduced to what is essential. The poem accepts ageing without self-pity, even with a quiet sense of relief.
Truth and appearance
The contrast between the "many" leaves and the "one" root is also a contrast between surface and substance. Calling youth's days "lying" suggests that the flourish of youth was a kind of pretence, a performance in the sun. Truth, in the last line, is what remains when the performance ends.
Context
The poem was first collected in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (Cuala Press, 1910), when Yeats was in his mid-forties. The book shows him paring his style down from the ornate music of the 1890s, and this quatrain reads almost as a comment on that change: the flowers are shed and the plain root remains.
Form
A single quatrain rhymed ABAB ("one" and "sun", "youth" and "truth"), in loose lines of four beats. The rhyme of "youth" with "truth" does the poem's work in miniature: it pairs the two words the poem sets against each other.
