The Four Ages of Man
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: He with body waged a fight
In brief
SummaryA man's life as four wars: with body, heart, mind and God.
Four couplets tell the whole of a life as a series of battles. First a man fights his body, and the body wins: he grows up and walks upright. Then he struggles with the heart, and innocence and peace leave him. Then he struggles with the mind, leaving his proud heart behind. Last of all he goes to war with God, and the poem ends with a flat prediction: at midnight, God will win. The tone is terse and almost cheerful, as if defeat in each round were simply how growth works.
Lines to remember
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Body and heart
The first fight is with the body, which wins, so that the child becomes a grown man walking upright. The second is with the heart, the age of love and passion, and it costs him his innocence and peace. Each loss moves him on to the next stage.
Lines 5 to 8Mind, then God
Next comes the struggle with the mind, the age of thought, in which he leaves his proud heart behind. Finally he takes on God. The last line is certain of the result: at the stroke of midnight, the hour of death, God wins.
Themes
Stages of life
The poem shrinks a lifetime into four ages, each named by what the man struggles with: body, heart, mind, God. Each stage is lost rather than won, yet each loss is a kind of growth. Walking upright, the prize of the body's victory, sounds like both a defeat and an achievement.
Death and God
The final war is the one no one survives. "At stroke of midnight" suggests both the end of a day and the end of a life. God's victory is stated as plain fact, without fear or complaint, which makes death sound less like a tragedy than the last move of a long campaign.
Context
The poem is one of the Supernatural Songs, a sequence first collected in The King of the Great Clock Tower (Cuala Press, 1934) and then in A Full Moon in March (Macmillan, 1935). Several of these songs compress Yeats's late philosophy of history and the soul into a few lines.
The fourfold pattern echoes the systems of stages and cycles Yeats worked out in A Vision, where a single life and a whole civilisation pass through similar phases. Here that elaborate scheme is reduced to its simplest terms: four couplets, four struggles, one ending.
Form
Eight short lines of four beats in rhyming couplets (fight and upright, heart and depart, mind and behind, begin and win), set out as four two-line stanzas. Each couplet is one age of life, and the steady, clipped rhymes make the progress sound fixed and inevitable.