The Truth of When You are Old

William Butler Yeats wrote a poem called “When You are Old” in the year 1892. The poem is very short just 12 lines long and is divided into 3 quatrains. The poem is basically about painful “unrequited love” or love that is just one sided; it starts off with an anonymous narrator who wants his former lover to remember of her youth and his endlessly love for her, and to make her reciprocate the feelings before is too late and his gone. Yeats did and excellent job manipulating and composing the poem in an interesting manner; he uses literally devices such as alliteration, repetition, end rhythm, internal rhythm, assonance, metaphor, personification, symbols and imagery throughout the poem. And this was to make the reader have a deeper understanding of the poetry and appreciate it and to either connect or sympathize over the narrator. Although is not specifically said in the poem who the person is, it is being said that like other of Yeats poems dealing with love this was about his unrequited love for "Maud Gonne" who rejected his love.

In Stanza 1 of the poem "When You are Old", Poet Yeats talks here about a girl in present tense, to consider her future that when she becomes old, she should and is going to remember all the flashbacks and memories whether they were good or bad. In his opening verse he refers to as "old and grey" and "full of sleep" and how she should take down a book about how her "eyes had once, and of their shadows deep" in this it makes the reader think of a woman of old age dozing off and remembering her past experiences. The choice of words Yeat uses makes the tempo of the first stanza be slow and calm, through alliteration of long sounds in the L's and W's. Is also interpreted through the line that says "And s...

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...ng down beside the glowing bars,” (“bending/beside/bar”) and uses the symbol of the dying fire that once was her beauty and has faded over time, like once the fire was vibrant and her beauty too and slowly dying meaning her becoming older.

I was fascinated by the poem, when I began reading it I couldn’t stop thinking of what the whole poem was going to be about. I first assumed that it was about an old woman sitting down and going back through her memories. For a while, I had no clue that the poem would have a deeper meaning. Yeats’ poem “When You Are Old” demonstrates that you won’t notice the real value of the things you have until you don’t have them anymore. This theme was discreetly communicated throughout the poet’s use of diction and tone. And to connect to it even more this poem deals with the unrequited love he had for Maud Gonne that was never return .