Do you ever reminisce about a lover that you had in your early years? Have you ever been young and deeply in love with someone and fascinated by his or her beauty? WB Yeats’ poem “When You Are Old and Grey” is a poem that he wrote to express those emotions. The man once loved a woman who he never seems to forget even at his old age. Even though he was forgotten by the woman, he still fells the same way he felt towards her at a very young age despite of the woman’s rejection as he mentions in his poem: “how love fled” – line 10
The structure of the poem is balanced since it has 3 stanzas, all with the same number of lines, which was 4. The poem is 12 lines in total . The mood is unhappy, depressed, and nostalgic of the romance that he lost and left him broken hearted. Sadness is shown within the writer’s tone as well as admiration and passion. The sadness is shown when Yeats said:“ Murmur a little sadly “line 10. And dream of the soft look your eyes had once and of their shadows deep”-line 4 proves the writer’s admiration for his old lover and no matter how much she changed, he loves her just as he “loved the sorrows of [her] changing face” –line 8. The poem has rhythm and some rhyming words include: “sleep-deep” –line 1 and 4, “book-look”-line2 and 3,”grace-face”line 5 and 8, and the list goes on. WB Yeats’ language is very descriptive. He mentions a lot of details like “when you are old and grey and full of sleep”-line 1.
The writer is also able to keep on describing his lover by repeating “and” in the start of most of the lines. The poem includes literary devices such as the personification shown in “love fled” –line 10. Within the various symbols in the poem some include: “Full of sleep” found within the first line of the poem as it symbolizes tiredness and the lack of energy and perhaps the end of life, which proves the extent of WB’S love which never seems to fade away no matter how much time passes. “Old and grey” –line 1 symbolizes aging.
The Essay on Judith Wright Poems Love Earth
Judith Wright's second anthology Woman to Man (1949) is better known for the freshness of her approach in examining until-then taboo subjects of sexual desire and especially women's sexuality. Such economical though passionate poems as Woman to Child and Woman to Man, apart from confounding thousands of adolescents in their final school-year examination papers, provided a new language for ...
The book in: “Take down this book” could perhaps symbolize the distraction that took away WB’s lover from him. To summarize things I would say that the overall theme is rejection and the loss of a loved and the writer’s emotional estate was depression and sadness because of the loss that he keeps on remembering until the last days of his lives. So if you ever feel the same way that the writer feels, then rest assured because if you have ever lost a loved one that you can’t forget about, you can now ensure that you aren’t the only one that feels that way. Made By: Dima Al Dakheel
