When You Are Old-Poem

Title: When You Are Old

Author: William Butler Yeats

Speaker: The poem is written by a man, and the man plans to include it in a book of poetry. This man is writing the poem to someone he loved who did not return this feeling. The tone of the piece is a mixture of nostalgia for the unrequited love and reprisal to the object of affection for being to vain to notice real love when it presented itself.

Structure: The poem is divided into 3 stanzas, each containing 4 lines, and each line containing 10 syllables. It is composed of two sentences, the first discussing the past that will be remembered by the reading if the poem and the second expressing the future of what will happen after the memories flood back.

Theme: The theme is not directly stated, but the reader can safely assume that the writer is talking to a person he once loved deeply. This person was beautiful and fair with a lot of suitors, and so embracing beauty and vanity looked not at the man that really loved her (the speaker of the poem) but to others who, when her age started to catch up with her, left her all alone. The theme is regret for not paying attention to real love when it happened.

Figures of speech: In the poem there is personification when her soul is described as a pilgrim soul and when the face is described as sorrowful), hyperbole when describing the consequences of age on the woman’s face, and metaphor in the last lines where love is said to go up to the mountains and disappear into the sky.

Symbolism: This poem does not have heavy symbolism, yet it has some important symbols. The face of the woman represents not only her face, but her entire persona. The face is used as a symbol for holistic beauty and fairness, while the soul is used as a symbol for personality, way of being, values, and feelings. Then, the night sky with stars serve as a symbol for the large amounts of people that, to her, are just there: people who have nothing to set one apart from another and to stand out.