When You Are Old: Yeats is Something Else

The poem “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats is a great example of how poetry can be simple but also incredibly beautiful. 

For a poem published in 1893 it feels more modern to me. Though it falls into some traditional structures like three quatrains (stanzas with four lines), an ABBA rhyme scheme, and a syllabic structure of iambic pentameter (that is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), it doesn’t feel like all of this is going on when you’re reading the poem. 

The first thing I want to note is that the arc of the poem is simply stunning to me. We begin by the fire in the first stanza and we come back to the fire in the final stanza mimicking the cycle of life. We begin and end at the same place. Or like Genesis 3:19 states, “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” THe same thing that makes this poem beautiful is what makes life beautiful. We have a beginning, a place where we find the start to the story, we have all of the action and life in the middle (particularly love as emphasized by the poem), and then in the end we lose it all and return to where we started. Yeats acknowledges that it is “a little [sad]” but that’s how it goes. Life is beautiful because it ends. This poem is beautiful because it ends. If it continued forever we would get bored of it and stop reading. There would be no reason for it.

Another thing I love about this is its sense of ambiguity. We have a You character, we have “this book” as an entity, and we have “one man” as another character. The poem could be addressing the reader because the you is unclear, but it feels very intimate and personal in how it recounts moments of love in the second stanza. Yeats could be addressing himself or the narrator could be their own separate character. At some points, to me, it almost seems like the book (of poetry?) is being made into a character too. Maybe we’re dealing with the personification of poetics. Okay, that might be a stretch but these are the kinds of things we should contemplate when analyzing poetry. 

Whoever might be addressed in this poem, it is incredibly beautiful in its structure, rhythm, and theme of aging and coming to grips with life. Not many people can write poems like this and that is why Yeats is regarded as one of the best to ever do it.