The Secrets of the Old

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1928from The Tower18 lines

The Secrets of the Old

I have old women’s secrets nowThat had those of the young;Madge tells me what I dared not thinkWhen my blood was strong,And what had drowned a lover onceSounds like an old song.

Though Margery is stricken dumbIf thrown in Madge’s way,We three make up a solitude;For none alive to-dayCan know the stories that we knowOr say the things we say:

How such a man pleased women mostOf all that are gone,How such a pair loved many yearsAnd such a pair but one,Stories of the bed of strawOr the bed of down.

Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.

In brief

Summary

Three old people share love stories no one else alive remembers.

The ninth poem of "A Man Young and Old". The old man says that once he knew young women's secrets and now he knows old women's. Madge tells him things he "dared not think" when young, and what once could have "drowned a lover" now sounds like an old song. Margery and Madge cannot bear each other, yet the three of them make up "a solitude": nobody else alive knows their stories. The last stanza lists them, lightly and knowingly: who pleased women most, which pairs loved long or only once, tales "of the bed of straw / Or the bed of down".

Lines to remember

I have old women's secrets now

We three make up a solitude;

Sounds like an old song.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 6Old women's secrets
"I have old women's secrets now / That had those of the young". Madge tells him what he "dared not think" when his "blood was strong". Passion that "had drowned a lover once" now "Sounds like an old song": age turns desperate feeling into something almost tuneful.
Lines 7 to 12A solitude of three
Margery is "stricken dumb" whenever she meets Madge, so there are quarrels even here. Yet "We three make up a solitude", a lovely paradox: three people who are alone together, because "none alive to-day" can know their stories or "say the things we say".
Lines 13 to 18The stories
The colon opens their store of gossip. They know "How such a man pleased women most", which couple loved "many years" and which "but one", and tales of "the bed of straw / Or the bed of down", the loves of the poor and of the rich. Nobody is named: the secrets stay secret.

Themes

Shared memory

The three old people are the last keepers of a whole world of love stories. "None alive to-day / Can know the stories that we know", and when they die the stories die with them. Their "solitude" is not loneliness but a private kingdom of memory that the young cannot enter.

Passion recalled

What once was overwhelming, enough to have "drowned a lover", now "Sounds like an old song". Age does not erase passion; it turns it into story and music. The closing list, the "bed of straw" and the "bed of down", treats love across every class with the calm amusement of people who have seen it all.

Context

"The Secrets of the Old" is the ninth poem in "A Man Young and Old", first collected in The Tower (Macmillan, 1928). Madge is the old woman of "The Friends of his Youth" who nurses a stone as if it were a child. Here she is lucid, a storehouse of secrets, and the old man's companion rather than the object of his laughter.

Form

Three six-line stanzas in ballad metre, four-beat lines alternating with three-beat lines, with the short lines rhyming ("young", "strong", "song"; "way", "to-day", "say"; "gone", "one", "down"). The colon at the end of the second stanza carries the voice straight on into the list of stories, as if gossip were spilling out.

The Secrets of the Old