When you are old
When you are oldAnalysis of “When You Are Old” by W. B. Yeats
This poem When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats is about Yeats telling his lover how it is going to be when she is old, and he is not around anymore. He is telling her how much he loves her now and how she will think about his love when she is old. She does not say anything although the speaker imagines her saying something in the end of this poem. Yeats wrote this when he was 28, and he talks about what she might be doing, feeling, dreaming when she is old. This poem is very sweet and sad, because he is telling her how he loves her, but at the same time he is not going to be alive when she is old.
Yeats starts out his poem with the setting. In the first four lines, he describes the time, the place where the woman will be, and what she will be doing at that time when she is old. Basically he describes her old age and how she will read her book near the fireplace dreaming about how she was when she was young.
She is “old and grey and full of sleep.” “Grey” describes her hair color, and her eyes look “full of sleep” since she is old and has wrinkles around her eyes. She is “nodding by the fire”, taking “down this book” that she reads slowly. She is reading a book near the fireplace. She is also dreaming “of the soft look” her “eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.” Therefore, she is thinking about the times when she was young and had soft look in her eyes and her deep shadows in her eyes that she used to have.
In the first four lines, Yeats describes from broad thing then he goes into details. Being old is the broad description, and he explains what an old woman will have in her old age such as grey hair and sleepy eyes. Then he explains what she will do. He could have just said that she was old. However, by describing all these substances Yeats makes readers and the woman who he actually wrote for to imagine the situation that is described.
Therefore, when she is in...
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