The Poem Analysis

When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats is a poem about love and loss in life
especially when people are getting older or when people’s age are falling away. In this poem the
speaker itself is an old man. He is addressing an elderly woman and asking her to reminisce
about the life she has had, it is speaking back to a young age of the woman and what it is like to
grow old, he is intelligibly told to the woman abouts what will happen when she gets old.

In the first stanza the speaker told about the woman as being “old and grey”, not only
meaning her physical state, but also a mental one. In the second line, the speaker demonstrates
the woman takes down a book – perhaps a book recounting her life which is a diary or a book of
poem that related to her youth age so she can look over the memories of her past. In any case, it
is a book designed to help her recall her former glories. In the third and fourth lines, the poem
describes about her feelings after looking over to the book and remembering the past, it shows
that there’s a bitter sweet moment in her youth age. In the lines “of the soft look your eyes had
once, and of their shadows deep”. let us know that her eyes are no longer soft; the age has
hardened her and changed her. It also reminds her when she was beautiful; on the other, she
knows her looks have faded, so she will only be able to dream and memorize the time.

In the second stanza, the lines, certainly, have the connection with previous stanza which
is tell about her memories when she was young and beautiful. The lines shows how her young
age made her so attractive which points out that so many men loved her beauty and moments of
triumph, especially in the lines “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you” the image is there
to show us that beyond many men who love her, her looks and some kind of things, there’s a
pure love of the old man to the woman, it tells that besides other men, the only one man that
loved the pigrim soul in her is different from others because he loved her for who she is deep
inside; he even loved her as her looks began to fade – “the sorrows of your changing face”.

The third stanza surprisilingly shows me what is actually happened after all, this stanza is
a kind of dark and the sombre but, furtunately, the lines “Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled.”
Could give me a hints that this stanza tells about the woman rejection to the man. It describes the
elderly woman’s sad memory of love ‘fleeing’ away from her and never coming back after the
rejection. From this poem, I assume that this isn’t really written from the perspective of two old
people. It’s written about two young people imagining what life will be like when they are old,
this young people, especially the man, tried to convice the woman she loved that there’s no other
pure love like his love, but once she rejects her, then, there’s no longer love for her; the man’s
love would not be everlasting, not because he stops losing but it might can happened because he
has gone away.

Citations :

- www.poetryoutloud.org
- http://www.ireland-calling.com/wb-yeats