Once rejected, the speaker indicates, love will not return and life will remain lifeless and dull. As she bends over the fire, the connection is finally made between the woman and the speaker, understanding that the poet is discussing the death of love as the fire dies, the embers turn to ashes and the sparks fly out into the sky never to be recaptured. This metaphor is extended into the second stanza as the speaker mentions the woman’s ‘pilgrim soul” (7), which indicates a soul, not a body, wandering.įrom this point, there is only sorrow, bending down and ending within a ‘crowd of stars’ (12). Although they are intended to indicate the depth of the girl’s soul, these shadows also suggest the shadow of death that hovers over older people, particularly when they’re dozing. This idea is reinforced by the ‘shadows’ mentioned in the fourth line. In the first stanza, a connection is made between sleep and death as the poem conjures the picture of the old woman nodding by the fire and then dreaming. Through the imagery and the tone, a number of metaphors are created that enable the poem to make connections with the generations that have read it since it was written. The third stanza remains subdued but with a hint of hope as more variety in sound is introduced throughout the stanza. The second stanza focuses on the long /a/ sound with the bracketing rhyming words ‘grace’ and ‘face’. This is using the long /e/ sound in the first stanza, through such words as ‘sleep’, ‘read’ and ‘deep’. It keeps the reader awake by interspersing sudden-sounding changes in sound in the first and second stanzas. It lulls the reader into an almost hypnotic state within the first line using words with soothing /o/ sounds in ‘you’, ‘old’, ‘full’ and ‘of’. The tone is also set by the way that the poem uses sound.
This adds a sense of excitement to the poem and a sense that there is hope for the woman to still change her mind. Although this kind of meter can be used to make people feel very secure and easy in the beat, it is often interrupted by throwing off the stressed beats every once in a while. This idea of expectation is encouraged in the way that the speaker allows his thoughts to travel from the end of one line over into the next. This means each line has an odd number of stressed beats to it which introduces a sense of expectation in the reader. The meter used in the poem is iambic pentameter, which means that each line has five unstressed beats alternated with five stressed beats. The warning note in the poem comes through in the arrhythmic meter and often hollow sounds that establish a mournful tone. Thus the imagery takes the reader from the present to the past to the present to the past in quick succession as the speaker takes the female listener from youth to age to youth to age. This is suggested as he suggests she is bending over the “glowing bars” of the fire and how her love “hid his face amid a crowd of stars” (9, 12). This image suggests that the woman, in not choosing wisely, is now left lonely and alone, despairing over the fire trying to capture a lost love out of the embers of her dying fire. This insincerity of the admirers is immediately contrasted against the image of “one man” who loved her “changing face” (7-8), indicating a man who was sincere in wanting to spend his life with her and watch as her face changed with the marks of time. The speaker reminds the woman of the many admirers “with love false and true” (6) she had who paid tribute to her happy moods and external beauty. From this point, the focus shifts to an image of the woman as a young woman – “the soft look / your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep” (3-4). This image is constructed throughout the first three lines through phrases such as “old and grey,” “full of sleep,” “nodding by the fire” and “slowly read” (1-3). The poem opens by presenting the reader with a mental image of an old woman dozing in a cozy chair by a warm fire reading. The poem begins it appeal to the reader through the careful imagery incorporated within its lines. In Yeats’ “When You are Old,” the speaker warns an unknown young woman of the regrets she will have as an older woman while the poem sends a message to all generations regarding the importance of choosing love through imagery, tone and metaphor.
Essentially, the poem traces the woman’s imagined feelings as an older woman looking back on a life in which she followed superficial adoration instead of sincere affection. However, this poem reaches out to all generations because of the way he uses tone, imagery and metaphor.
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