Elise\’s Blog

 William Yeat’s “When You Are Old”

This poem has a rhyme scheme of a-b-b-a. The audience of this poem is brought to the reader’s attention  until the seventh line when Yeats says “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” This tells us that the narrator is talking to a woman that he used to love. The poem tells a story in a way that is talking about the woman when she is old. Yeats makes that known by the title of the poem. When this woman is old, the narrator tells her to “take down this book/ And slowly read, and dream of the soft look/ Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep,” which refers to the book that this poem is in. Yeats is also saying that the old woman should look back on her life while reading this poem and remember when she was young and when the narrator was in love with her. We get the feeling that this love was lost when Yeats writes “Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled.” It seems as though the narrator of this poem mainly wanted to help the old, tired, woman remember a time when she was happy and loved.