"when You Are Old And Grey"
(A poem by W.B.Yeats: a commentary by A.J.Rao)
When You are Old
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.
A popular poem of W.B.Yeats , this one is supposed to be echoing another poem by a French Renaissance poet Pierre Ronsard and is on Maude Gonne , a socialite of the day who cold-shouldered him in love. The striking thing about the poem is not the depth of the content but the beauty of the short melodic rhythms as though it were a song. A fairly simple poem it does draw on mythology (?and hid his face amid a crowd of stars ?)but uses a somewhat straightforward speech.
The poem sounds, on the face of it, like a piece of syrupy love poetry , absolutely trite and with little or no imagery worth the name. Yet the rhythm of the poem is memorable and captivating. One even suspects an undercurrent of irony as though the poet is debunking the idea of being in love. Watch the use of the words like ?fled? ?a little sadly?, ?hid his face? etc which sound as if the whole poem has come out of a parody.
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