'When You Are Old' Analysis: W. B. Yeats' Poem for Maud Gonne

What Is the Theme of 'When You Are Old' by William Butler Yeats?

The central theme of W. B. Yeats' poem 'When You Are Old' is unrequited love. The words are a final declaration of love by someone who appears to have lost hope that his devotion will ever be reciprocated. The poem can also be read as cautioning the reader not to miss the opportunity for true, enduring love.

What Person/Point of View Is 'When You Are Old' Written In?

The lines of 'When You Are Old', which have a tone of resigned finality, are written in the second-person point of view and are addressed to someone with whom the speaker is very familiar. The poem's voice is intensely personal and sad.

Full Text of 'When You Are Old' (1892) by W. B. Yeats

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.

W. B. Yeats' Relationship With Maud Gonne

The great love of Yeats' life was the Irish actress and revolutionary Maud Gonne, who was equally famous for her intense nationalist politics and her beauty. In W.B. Yeats: A Life, biographer Robert Fitzroy Foster describes Gonne as 'majestic' and 'unearthly', a woman whose 'classic beauty came straight out of epic poetry' (88).

Yeats first met Gonne in 1889, when he was 23 years old, and immediately fell in love with her. In his memoirs, he writes that the meeting was 'when the troubling of my life began' (40).

Gonne was a strong influence on Yeats' poetry. Yeats writes that '[Maud] brought into my life [...] the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese going, an overpowering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes' (40).

Yeats' Unrequited Love

Yeats proposed to Gonne on many occasions but was always met with rejection. Gonne maintained, perhaps as an excuse, that Yeats' unrequited love contributed to the effectiveness of his writing. The sentiments expressed in the poem 'When You Are Old' suggest that it was written with Gonne in mind.

In 1903, Gonne married John MacBride, an Irish republican and military leader. The two separated in 1905 and, three years later in Paris, Gonne and Yeats slept together, though their romantic relationship did not last. MacBride was later executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin.

Yeats went on to marry Bertha Hyde-Lees on October 20, 1917. The marriage lasted until his death in 1939.

An Interpretation of 'When You Are Old'

'When You Are Old' is directed toward one young person, presumably a woman if read in the light of Yeats' biographical details (though a reader could apply the sentiments expressed in the poem to a man). I have made an assumption that Maud Gonne is the person about whom Yeats wrote, as she was his muse.

The speaker in the poem talks about a current situation but also predicts the future.

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First Stanza

The first stanza seems self-referential in that it implies that the poem will be published in a book. The addressee is urged to read it in old age to remind herself of the past and her lost beauty.

Second Stanza

In the first two lines of the second stanza, the speaker continues the theme of reminiscence. The addressee will recall that, in her youth – her 'moments of glad grace' – she was loved by many men. She will remember that as her beauty and youth have faded into the past, so has their love.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

– W. B. Yeats

In lines three and four, the speaker tells her that one man (implicitly himself) loved her better than anyone else – because he loved her not only for her physical attributes but also for the nature of her soul. It is implied that she should regret the lost opportunity to be truly loved.

Though the lines ostensibly describe what the woman will remember in old age, they are actually a declaration of present-day love. 'Pilgrim' is an unusual word choice to describe a woman's soul – a pilgrim is a person on a journey in search of something or somewhere. Perhaps the speaker sees his beloved as someone who is constantly searching for something or somebody. Historically, a pilgrim made a journey to a holy place.

Third Stanza

The third stanza again presents a current situation projected into the woman's old age. The speaker tells her to remember that she rejected the man who truly loved her and predicts that the memory will make her a little sad. He evidently will have given up his pursuit of her, left in a state of agitation to 'pace upon the mountains overhead' and disappear 'amid a crowd of stars'. The lines seem to suggest that, because of her rejection, he will never find peace. One day, he will die and become stardust, and she will have lost him forever.

In summary, the poem seems to be both a warning about the future and an appeal to the beloved to reconsider, to see that without him, old age will be bleak and full of regret.

Richard Ellmann has written an excellent biography of Yeats called Yeats: The Man and the Masks, in which he details an interview with Maud Gonne.

Poetic Devices in 'When You Are Old'

• Form: the shape and pattern of a poem, created through the related devices of stanza and metre. See the next section for more about the form of 'When You Are Old'.
• Line: the basic poetic device that distinguishes poetry from prose. A poet inserts line breaks at specific points for various reasons. They may emphasise a word or an idea, for example, or follow a structured rhythm. 'When You Are Old' has a total of 12 lines.
• Rhyme: A skilled poet can create a musical experience for the reader/listener through sound patterns. Rhyme often occurs at the end of a line, as in 'sleep' and 'deep' in lines one and four in 'When You Are Old'. But they can also occur mid-line, as in 'read' and 'dream' in line three.
• Speaker: the 'voice' of the poem. Some poems are personal and directly addressed to a specific person or group, while others are public and impersonal. The speaker is not necessarily the poem's author, though in the case of 'When You Are Old', it's easy to imagine Yeats himself as the speaker.
• Imagery: the representation of a thing, typically through vivid or figurative language. Imagery may be used to defamiliarise the familiar.
• Metaphor: an implicit comparison between two things. A metaphor does not use the words 'like' or 'as'. The first stanza in 'When You Are Old' creates an implicit comparison between sleep and death.
• Theme: what the poem is fundamentally about. A theme is an idea that the writer runs with through the poem or to which they return. 'When You Are Old' deals with themes of unrequited love, beauty and the passing of time.
• Alliteration: the repeated use of a letter or syllable, usually at the start of a word. Note, for example, how frequently the soft sibilant letter 's' is used in the first stanza of 'When You Are Old'. It slows the pace and emphasises the sad tone of the poem.
• Repetition: In the second stanza of this poem, the word 'loved' is used four times.

Not all poems, particularly modern ones, contain all of the elements mentioned above. You should, however, be able to detect most of them in 'When You Are Old'.

The Form of the Poem 'When You Are Old'

The form of 'When You Are Old' is:

• A 12-line poem of 3 quatrains.
• Each line has 10 syllables written in iambic pentameter (five pairs of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables).
• The punctuation in the first verse, with caesuras in lines two, three and four, slows the pace of the poem, reinforcing the mental imagery of a tired, elderly person with the words 'sleep', 'nodding', 'slowly' and 'dream'.

End-Rhyme Pattern of the Poem

• Verse 1: ABBA
• Verse 2: CDDC
• Verse 3: EFFE

References

• Fallon, Donal. John MacBride: 16Lives. The O'Brien Press, 2015.
• Foster, Robert Fitzroy. W. B. Yeats: A Life, Book 1. Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Khan, Jalal Uddin, and ﺧﺎﻥﺟﻼﻝ ﺍﻟﺪﻳﻦ. 'Yeats and Maud Gonne: (Auto)Biographical and Artistic Intersection'. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 22 (2002): 127–47.
• Yeats, William Butler. Memoirs [of] W. B. Yeats: Autobiography [and] First Draft Journal. Macmillan, 1972.

This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.

Questions & Answers

Question: How is the journey from youth to old age described in the poem "When You Are Old" by W.B. Yeats?