The Wild Old Wicked Man

A roving old man courts a pious woman and chooses earthly love.

A wild old wanderer, as mad about women as about the hills, courts a woman. He asks only not to die at home on the straw with no loving hands to close his eyes. He argues that age gives him what young men lack: words that pierce the heart, where they can only touch. She answers that her love is given to an older man, God, and her hands are busy with her rosary. He goes off to the girls of the seashore instead, bragging that he can make a cat laugh and knows the ancient secrets of the body. Then the poem deepens. All men suffer, he says, whatever their station, and the lightning of God can burn that suffering away. But he is a coarse old man and chooses the second-best: forgetting it for a while on a woman's breast. Every stanza ends with the same refrain of dawn and a burnt-down candle.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 9Mad about women

   The old man is introduced in his own words, linking his love of women with his love of wild country. His prayer to God is not for salvation but for a death on the road, with a woman's hands to close his eyes. The refrain enters: daybreak, and a candle almost burnt out.

2. Lines 10 to 18Words that pierce

   He presses his suit. No one knows when an old man's blood will cool, and he has an advantage over the young: he has words that go to the heart, while a young lover, who loves too much, can only touch. Age is recast as eloquence.

3. Lines 19 to 27An older man

   The woman replies that love is not hers to give. She has given it all to an older man than him, God, and hands busy with rosary beads cannot close a dying lover's eyes. Her answer turns his own phrase about the old man in the skies against him.

4. Lines 28 to 36Girls on the seashore

   Rebuffed, he chooses another target: the girls of the seashore who understand the dark, with bawdy talk for the fishermen and dances for the young ones. The stanza is cheerfully earthy, a world of night and appetite far from her prayers.

5. Lines 37 to 45Young in the dark

   He brags that he is young in the dark and only old in daylight. His wit can make a cat laugh, and his instinct can reach things buried deep in the body's memory, hidden from the clumsy young men who lay with those same girls.

6. Lines 46 to 54All men suffer

   The tone darkens. He knows, as few do, that everyone suffers: the ambitious and the contented, the rower and the weaver, the rider sitting upright and even the child in the womb. The catalogue of bent and upright bodies makes suffering universal.

7. Lines 55 to 63The second-best

   He admits that a stroke of divine lightning can burn out that suffering; no properly taught man would deny it. But he is a "coarse old man" and takes the lesser remedy, forgetting his pain for a while on a woman's breast. The refrain closes the poem.

Themes

Context

The poem was first published in book form in New Poems (1938). In his seventies Yeats wrote many ballads and songs in the voices of rough, outspoken characters, old men and wild women, through whom he could speak about sex, age and religion more bluntly than in his own person. The wild old wicked man, wandering the roads, is one of the most vivid of them, and readers have often seen something of the poet's own self-image in him.

Form

Seven stanzas of eight lines in ballad metre, alternating lines of four and three beats and rhyming on the second and fourth lines of each quatrain, each stanza followed by a one-line refrain. The ballad form gives the old man the voice of a wandering singer, and the dialogue brings in the woman's reply.