When You Are Old, Yeats’s Poem of Unrequited Love

          The poem, When You Are Old, written by William Butler Yeats, is a quintessential love poem. This is a beautiful emulation of the famous poem Sonnets pour Helene by Pierre Ronsard (We read this poem in 10th grade). In Yeats’s work, the speaker visualizes his lover, not in the present, but how she may appear as aged and on her death bed. Yeats, in this autobiographical poem, tenderly reminisces about his past unrequited love, Maud Gonne (Sarker 117). The tone of the poem is gloomy and contemplative. Through diction, meter, rhyme scheme, and sensory imagery, Yeats creates downhearted, sorrowful feelings concerning this alluring woman. As he visualizes Maud in her golden years, he suggests that he will continue to yearn for her.

          The diction prevalent in the poem plays a fundamental role in presenting the pain and frustration of this unrequited love. Yeats’s specific word choices in the first stanza, "old and gray," "full of sleep," “slowly read,” and “dream of the soft look / Your eyes had once,” depict the appeal of youth long past its prime. The reader is thus prepared for the lamentations of a lost lover. In the second stanza, it is again Yeats’s use of specific words that creates the aura of a woman “many loved.” He paints this picture by the phrases “glad grace” and “loved your beauty.” Yeats goes on to describe the one love that surpasses all others, by saying, “loved the pilgrim soul in you” and “loved the sorrows of your changing face,” which make the reader feel the depth and pain of his regretful love. In the final stanza, Yeats uses words to make the reader feel the sorrow that encompasses one in old age when realizing “a little sadly” what was lost and what might have been. Yeats ends the poem by depicting the true lover as a star perpetually shining down upon his one true love. 

The meter of the poem is iambic pentameter, with five sets of unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one, as shown in the first line: “When you are old and gray and full of sleep.” Throughout the poem, the stressed syllables fall typically on the more descriptive, important words, such as “loved,” “beauty,” and “you.” Since the speaker emphasizes these words, they reiterate the importance of the apostrophic character with the narrator, to the reader. 

          The rhyme scheme of When You Are Old is: abba cddc effe. The words that rhyme at the ends of lines emphasize the vowel sounds, such as “sleep,” “book,” and “true.” However, the first two stanzas have long vowel sounds, whereas the third has short vowel sounds, in words such as “bars” and “fled.” The rhyme scheme has the effect of moving from the present when she is old, to the past when she is young, which gives it an undulating effect.

          Sensory imagery, a means of deepening the reader’s comprehension of the thoughts the poet is trying to convey, is another of Yeats’s techniques. For example, in the first stanza:

                    And slowly read, and dream of the soft look 

                    Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

This stanza, when the old woman reads by the fire, sets the tone and mood for the poem. The reader can feel the sadness the woman feels as she relives the past. Imagery also is exemplified in the last stanza of the poem when Yeats writes: 

          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.

The capital “L” that Yeats puts on the word “love” here is done to imply that he has always been her ever-faithful love. Spiritually, he implies that he has never left her, always shining down upon her. He is the true love who, wherever she might be, is the constancy of her life as portrayed by the constancy of the stars. (658)