Week 13 Analysis: Literary Analysis of "When You Are Old"

For this week's analysis, I decided to write a literary analysis about "When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats. The theme of the poem is the theme of old age, as implied by the title. Yeats begins the poem with "when you are old and gray and full of sleep / and nodding by the fire, take down this book" (522). I felt that "when you are old" was phrased like that to state aging is inevitable, not just a possibility. I feel like it's his way of shocking people into reality; everyone grows old and age isn't something that happens to everyone but you. And to say that you will be "gray and full of sleep" also means your hair will its color eventually and you will grow to become constantly tired and without energy. Gone would be the days of horsing around and doing exciting things. In this poem, Yeats asks his audience to look at scrapbooks or other records of their past in order to remember the better days of their lives before growing old. "How many loved your moments of glad grace / and loved your beauty with love false and true" (522). Then he seems to bring God into the poem by saying "but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you / and loved the sorrows of your changing face" (522). He's reminding the audience, assuming the believe in God, that God will always love them no matter how old they become. When you grow old, you won't be able to participate in the activities you once loved to participate in, and you might feel like the friends and family of yours who still have their youth are on the road to forgetting you. Despite any doubts, God loving you will be constant and unwavering. This religious context can very easily affect how well someone relates to this poem. Someone who isn't religious might read this poem and think it's a bunch of nonsense; if their friends and family don't love them anymore, then no one does because they don't believe God is real. Conversely, someone like myself who at least believes God is real can make this connection and be reminded that we'll always be loved. Yeats ends the poem with a metaphor that refers to God up in Heaven. "Upon the mountains overhead / and hid his face amid a crowd of stars" (522). The inclusion of this metaphor is to address doubts the readers might have. If God loves us, why would he wait up in Heaven until we die to speak with us? Pairing this part of the poem with the early half of the poem that asks the audience to remember their youth answers this doubt. God chose to let us live life and enjoy it as much as possible before deciding to have his time with us.


Yeats, William Butler. "When You Are Old." The Norton Anthology World Literature, edited by
Martin Puchner, Third Edition, vol. D, W. W. Norton 2012, pp. 518-532