When You Are Old

William Butler Yeats was obsessed with aging, making the subject more than just a theme in this poem. Yeats’s preoccupation with aging can be traced as far back as his earliest work, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, in 1889. In “When You Are Old,” the speaker embodies Yeats’s apprehensive attitudes about aging and regret. This is clear from the poem’s beginning, when the speaker states “When you are old and grey and full of sleep” (Line 1)—while the subject of the poem is not yet old, Yeats has already envisioned their future decline. The speaker communicates that the only consolation the beloved will have in old age is that, at one time, the beloved had the speaker’s love. To add a sense of unmoored disconnect from the present, the speaker says, “And nodding by the fire, take down this book / And slowly read, and dream of the soft look” (Lines 2-3). The speaker’s emphasis on the word “dream” (Line 3) creates a sense of wandering and figurative flight, while the phrase “had once” (Line 4) emphasizes the word “dream” (Line 3) and its sense of wandering and flight, because it highlights the fleeting nature of time.