Analysis of When You are Old, by William Butler Yeats Essay

In lines six through nine the speaker says,”She was staring at me with her eyes, her breasts still sturdy, her thigh warming mine.” This sentence shows how the speaker began discovering his love for the first time with her(Harper 6-9). The speaker signifies that the woman is healthy and young when he refers to her still having sturdy breasts. The author uses imagery to represent the connection a person feels when they share a warm sensation of touch. When the speaker realizes she is staring at him he begins to wonder how long she had been staring at him and if she loved him.

“When You Are Old” is a poem that was written by William Butler Yeats in 1891. It is a poem about a person who wants to be remembered by those he loves. It is a story about dreams forgotten and memories long gone. Yeats captured a feeling of longing in this poem that some people may never understand unless they have a relationship that is more to them than any other relationship they will ever have. “When You Are Old” talks about a woman who was loved by a man until he died. It is a story of how a life should be remembered by a person who loved another.

• On page 89, “The shadows deepened in the little room. The music grew strange and fantastic—turbulent, insistent, plaintive and soft with entreaty. The shadows grew deeper. The music filled the room.” What are the shadows and music referencing besides themselves…what is happening?

Harwood revolves this poem around change, through the use of a motherly character she is able to construct a life style that has dramatically changed from free to a fairly constricted. Harwood uses the conversations of two people to get this message across, with the conversation discussing life’s progression with an old lover. “But for the grace of God…” suggests that the ex-lover is somewhat thankful for not ending up as a father figure to these children, as he can see the effect it has taken on her from when he used to know her. “Her clothes are out of date” shows her appearance has altered in the bid to live as a mother, her children are now her identity and that is what she will live to be. This poem is revolved around the negativity of losing yourself through mother-hood and the factors that slowly show that it.

Here’s some background information about myself: I am 19 years old, I am a Christian, and this is my Sophomore year of college. In the poem, two older women are talking about their views on life. The significant thing about their conversation is the fact that they both have two different ideas as to what life has left to offer them. They both agree that in the beginning life was sweet. I believe they were referring to how life was when they were younger women. They felt that life was rich and pure during those specific years. The first woman then goes on to say that life eventually grew

And is my face, and yours,” (pg525)(lines 1480) this is basically talking about that he got tired of the lies and he alse gives up;cause no one believes in

This is supported through his grievous diction throughout the poem. Through words like “loving”, Gascoigne uses his word choice to craft physical descriptions of the grief created in the man. The reader is able to create a picture in their mind of a male holding his head low due to his misery. This allows the reader to understand the ways in which gloom affects his outward appearance in society. Additionally, the usage of “grievous” in describing the game of love represents the outlook he’s developed due to the emotional damage caused by broken relationships full of lies and mistakes. He has learned that following the sudden attraction towards a woman, the process of forming and maintaining a healthy relationship is a hard process without much sense. Lastly, another example of these melancholy-associated words is “bale” in the final line. The captivating eyes of the woman are representative of his initial attraction physically towards the female, but now looking into them leads to feelings of despair and misery. Through these words (“loving”, “grievous”, and “bale”), Gascoigne has represented the emotional sadness and misery due to a broken relationship and established a mournful tone to accompany the previously addressed lesson learned from being hurt from

In the poem “Alzheimer’s”, Kelly Cherry has written about her father. It begins with an old man trying to make sense of the things around him. He is obviously confused, but tries to hide it. She writes that he carries with him, “A book he sometimes pretends to read” (Line 5). The man seems to identify with the struggle of the flowers as they fight for space on the brick wall, just as he is struggling with reconciling this house with the one he remembers (Lines 6-7) (15). Alzheimer’s

His “unlined” face has yet to have the heat of a forge baking the sweat off his face and cracking the skin transitioning him into a man. A man that needs to learn the craft of forgetting the burdens everyday life gives him. The line, “eyes amber as the resin from trees too young to be cut.”(ll 10-11). reinforces that he has to grow and be ‘seasoned’ before he is truly ready to make the transition and tackle the craft of drinking until numb. These lines like an artist waiting to sculpt their stone into something else. The reference of the eyes gives a relation to the difference of her father’s young and hopeful eyes that have not seen what her grandfathers have. This is important as it gives the wisdom and long struggle that separates the apprentice from the master. Eyes have also been described as windows to the soul and the way she relates her father’s eyes as young and translucent that have yet to meet the destructive force that well in her grandfather’s eyes.

While reading the poem, there are many different words and phrases that the author uses that suggest a sad, remorseful tone. The author uses phrases which imply that she does not want to grow up. The speaker sees teenagers around her every day, eager to grow up and become independent. However, she sees the world as it is, without blinders, and realizes that she needed to savor her time as a child. She is constantly seeing children around her, running into life, and not

The narrator then goes on to describe how she views the daughter as being the second great arrival within the household. Even though the daughter was the second “great arrival” in her household (the husband was the first), the narrator goes into great depth of how she slept, nursed, and grew up all in a blur, thus leading the reader to believe that even though she was second, she was always first to the narrator. At the end of the poem, the narrator compares the coming and eventual going of her daughter with bees that she caught when she was young. The bee will fly freely until caught, while in captivity it will sing its song, but when released will continue to fly away (Olds poetry foundation.org). This verse is a reference to her daughter coming home and eventually leaving. The theme behind Old’s poem is that of the narrator’s intense love for her daughter, and probably relates to the old adage “if you love something set it free, and it will come back again.”

Due to the lack of punctuation and the uncommon use of the word “you,” I had to read this poem a few times to really comprehend what was actually being said. Rather than the narrator using the word “you” to refer to another person, he or she is refers to their past self as “you.” The poem is really about the narrator losing himself or herself because they have become a different person. The title in this case is the most useful resource in trying to understand this poem because the narrator is literally speaking to himself or herself about what they used to be. The first few lines of the poem emphasize that the speaker is trying to find their old self having forgotten it and only remembering glimpses of the past. “Even when I forget you I

They (the great writers) were national first … and it was the intensity of their own nationalism which made them international. (Power 65)

Which is the main struggle throughout this poem as the women cannot come to realization that her youth and beauty is fading. The mirror does not show this mist and reveals to the women all her blemishes and aging marks.

On June 13 1865 William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin Ireland. From the start Yeats had artistic influences, due to the fact that his father Jack Butler Yeats was a noted Irish painter. He had no formal education until he was eleven, at that time he started at the Godolphin Grammar School in Hammer*censored*h England and later he enrolled in Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin. Throughout his schooling he was considered disappointing student, his studies were inconsistent, he was prone to day dreaming, and poor at sports. In 1884 Yeats found his way to the Metropolitan School for the Arts, here he met a poet by the name of George Russell. Yeats and Russell sheared the same dreams, visions, and the enthusiasm for them. Russell and Yeats