"When You Are Old" --WB 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.
Often (most of the time?) the truly profound lives in the most prosaic moments. In Yeats’s poem, we have an old woman, bending to fix the fire, taking note of the fact he, her “Love” — capitalized, mind you: the one — is now gone. What comfort do we find? — only a muted statement that he truly loved her “pilgrim soul;” he was her partner in life, which, while not a grand statement of burning passion, is, at least, real proof of lifelong dedication.
There is no anger here, just simmering mealancholy… Alas, he’s gone. But Yeats, though he refers to the speaker as someone who “paced upon the mountains overhead/And hid his face amid a crowd of stars,” doesn’t go saccharine and promise a reunion in Heaven. There is only the feeling of separation. A melancholy moment; a dull epiphany: shift a log; watch the embers fly up the flue; sigh that he is gone; go about one’s day…
Achingly, prosaically beautiful: