Why should not Old Men be Mad?
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1939. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2035, 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 2035.
It begins: Why should not old men be mad?
In brief
SummaryAn old man lists wasted lives and asks why he should stay sane.
The title question opens the poem, and the rest is the evidence. Old men have seen a promising lad with a fine fly-fisher's wrist turn into a drunken journalist, a girl who knew all Dante grow up to bear children to a dunce, and a Helen of social reform climb on a wagonette to scream. Look at the neighbours' lives as if on a lit screen, and not one story shows an unbroken happy mind, a finish worthy of the start. Young men know nothing of this; observant old men know it well, and, knowing too that old books tell the same, they know why an old man should be mad.
Lines to remember
Why should not old men be mad?
Line by line
Lines 1 to 8Three wasted lives
After the opening question come three portraits of promise gone wrong: the lad with a sportsman's skill who becomes a drunken journalist, the girl who knew Dante who marries a fool, and a beauty with dreams of social welfare reduced to screaming from a wagonette. Each couplet sets the start against the end.
Lines 9 to 15No happy ending
Some think it natural that chance starves the good and promotes the bad. If the neighbours' lives were shown plainly, as though projected on a lighted screen, not one would reveal a mind unbroken and happy, a finish worthy of its beginning. The cinema image makes every life a film with a disappointing last reel.
Lines 16 to 20What old men know
The young know nothing of this; observant old men know it well. When they also learn from old books that it was always so, and that nothing better can be had, they understand why an old man should be mad. The poem ends where it began, the question now an answer.
Themes
Wasted promise
The poem is built on the gap between beginning and end: skill that sinks into drink, learning that ends in a dull marriage, idealism that becomes shrill. "A finish worthy of the start" is what no life seems to achieve. Yeats writes with bitterness, but also with a sad clarity.
Old age and anger
Madness here means rage, not illness: the fury of those who have watched long enough to see how lives turn out. Like "The Spur", which names lust and rage as the proper companions of old age, the poem defends the old man's right to be wild rather than serene.
Context
The poem first appeared in On the Boiler (Cuala Press, 1939), a prose pamphlet of Yeats's late opinions, and was collected in Last Poems and Two Plays (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1939). Its sour view of modern life matches much of that pamphlet.
Readers have often taken the girl who knew Dante and the Helen on the wagonette as portraits of people close to Yeats, perhaps Iseult Gonne and her mother Maud Gonne, the political speaker he had loved. The poem itself names no one, and the portraits work just as well as types of wasted gifts.
Form
Twenty four-beat lines in rhyming couplets, some with half rhymes (plain and screen, start and sort). The poem is one long argument with no stanza breaks, and the closing couplet repeats the title's rhyme of mad, so the question comes round as its own answer.
