When You are Old

A young lover asks a woman to picture her old age and remember him.

The speaker addresses a woman who does not return his love. He asks her to imagine herself old, dozing by the fire, taking down "this book" of his poems and remembering how she once looked. Many men loved her beauty, he says, but only one loved "the pilgrim soul" in her and the sorrows in her face. The last stanza has her murmur that love has gone, and love becomes a figure who retreats to the mountains and hides among the stars. It is a quiet, tender poem with a sting: she will understand too late.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 4By the fire

   The poem opens with a command to the future. She will be "old and grey and full of sleep", nodding by the fire, and he tells her to take down "this book" and read slowly. The book is the one we are holding, so the poem becomes the thing that will stir her memory of "the soft look" her eyes once had.

2. Lines 5 to 8One true lover

   Here he sets himself apart from her other admirers. They loved her "moments of glad grace" and her beauty, "with love false or true", but "one man" loved her restless, searching spirit and even the sorrows that marked her face as it changed. The repeated "loved" drums through all four lines.

3. Lines 9 to 12Love flees

   Bending by the "glowing bars" of the grate, she murmurs "a little sadly" that love has fled. The ending turns love into a person who paces the mountains and hides "his face amid a crowd of stars": gone beyond reach, yet still somewhere above her, vast and lonely.

Themes

Context

The poem first appeared in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics in 1892, among the lyrics Yeats later grouped as "The Rose". It is a free reworking of a sonnet by the French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard, "Quand vous serez bien vieille", in which the poet tells his mistress she will one day sit by the fire singing his verses and regret scorning him.

It is read as a poem to Maud Gonne, whom Yeats met in January 1889 and loved for most of his life. She refused his proposals from 1891 onwards. Yeats revised the ending once: in 1892 the woman murmurs "From us fled Love" in direct speech, and from 1895 the lines take the quieter reported form printed here.

Form

Three quatrains of iambic pentameter, each rhymed abba ("sleep", "book", "look", "deep"). The enclosing rhyme folds each stanza in on itself, which suits the drowsy, inward mood. Long strings of clauses joined by "And" keep the voice slow and murmuring, like someone reading by the fire.