bladderwrack

William Butler Yeats. b. 1865

863. When You are Old

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

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.



I'd probably not like this poem nearly as much had I not come across it while I was writing an essay on the poem it is based on, Quand vous serez bien vieille, which consists basically of the poet telling the object of his affections that one day he'll be an immortal star and she'll be an old hag, and she'll regret not having slept with him then, the frigid bitch. XD The latter poem is one that rewards study, actually -- it has a beautiful depth of construction -- but it's hard to get past how explicitly Ronsard shows that his poetic mission is to talk about himself, and how much he seems to hate the (mostly imaginary) women he addresses*. The Yeats is less demanding, less corporeal in tone -- quieter on both ends.

*You hear this a /lot/ in certain types of song lyrics. The tentacles of culture run deep, sigh.

"the composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. to go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! a better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary...more reasonable, more inept, more indolent, i have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books." - borges