“When You Are Old” is a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. In the poem, which is published in Yeats’s second collection, The Rose (1893), the speaker asks someone to think ahead to old age, strongly suggesting that the addressee will eventually regret being unwilling to return the speaker’s love. Though the poem is one of the best-loved of Yeats’s works, many people don’t realise that it is based on a much earlier sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, a 16th century French Renaissance poet.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
The speaker directly addresses someone else and asks this person to imagine old age, a time of grey hair and general tiredness. The speaker tells the addressee to pick up this book when they’re falling asleep by the fire, and to read from it, while dreaming of the soft and shadowed look the addressee’s own eyes used to have. The addressee should also think of how many people loved the addressee’s gracefulness and beauty, whether or not these people were sincere in their love. But there was one man who genuinely loved the addressee’s emotional and spiritual restlessness. This man also loved the sadness that showed on the addressee’s face as it changed over the years. The speaker imagines the addressee bending down to tend to a fire and muttering sadly about how love ran away to walk restlessly in the mountains and hide among the stars of the night.
“When You Are Old” is a bittersweet poem that reveals the complexities of love. The poem is generally taken to be addressed to Maud Gonne, an Irish actress with whom Yeats was infatuated throughout his life (which is why we’re using male and female pronouns in this guide). That said, the poem can also be interpreted more broadly, without specifying the names or genders of either the speaker or the addressee. In any case, the poem argues in favour of a kind of love based not on physical appearances—which fade over time—but on the deeper beauty of the soul.
In the first stanza, the speaker asks the addressee to think ahead to a time when she will be old, tired, and grey. Then, says the speaker, the addressee will look back nostalgically on her life to date, thinking of her youthful looks and vigor as though they were a dream. Those who love the addressee now—that is, at the time of the poem’s writing, when this woman is ostensibly still young—are portrayed as superficial and insincere. The speaker implies that the so-called love of these men for the addressee will fade, just as the basis for that love—the addressee’s beauty and youth—will fade too. The speaker contrasts his own love for the addressee with the inferior love described above. The speaker’s love, the poem argues, will stand the test of time because it is based on the addressee’s “pilgrim soul” and the “sorrows” of her “changing face.” That is, the speaker perceives an inner restlessness of this woman’s soul and implies that this will express itself in her “changing face” as she grows old. The speaker, then, claims to experience love that goes beyond the surface—the addressee’s face may change over time, but the “soul” that the speaker loves will not.
Furthermore, the pilgrim-like quality of the addressee’s “soul” might be the very reason why she seems to have denied the speaker’s love. It sounds like the addressee refuses to settle down—meaning that the speaker is expressing love not just in spite of being rejected, but in part because of it too. With the above in mind, though, the speaker isn’t exactly painting a rosy picture of the addressee’s future. In essence, the speaker is predicting a lonely scene, one in which this woman has only a fire and a book for company. Indeed, the speaker predicts that it will be through reading “this book”—the one in which the poem appears—that the addressee will be reminded of her youth and, ultimately, her failure to embrace love when given the chance. The speaker is suggesting that the poem itself will stand as a testament to the speaker’s true form of love, when the shallow love of others is nothing but a distant memory.
The poem expresses a complicated sentiment, then, attesting to the power of love as well as its limits. Indeed, there is a hint of bitterness in the way the speaker predicts that the poem itself be a reminder of how love “fled” from the addressee. But whatever the complexities, there is no doubting the speaker’s strength of feeling—and through the poem, the reader is reminded that true love of the kind described is rarely simple, easy, or certain.
