By W. B. Yeats
When you are old and grey 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.
First published in The Rose (1893). Public domain.
On This Page: Summary · Analysis and Themes · Form and Structure · Historical Context · In Popular Culture · Related Poems
Summary
Spoken to an imagined future, the poem asks the beloved — when she is old, grey, and dozing by the fire — to take down this book and remember her younger self. Many admired her beauty, the speaker says, but only one man loved the “pilgrim soul” within her, and even the sorrows of her aging face. The final quatrain turns elegiac: she will murmur how Love itself fled, pacing the mountains and hiding “his face amid a crowd of stars.” It is a love poem that arrives disguised as a prophecy of regret.
Analysis and Themes
Across just three quatrains Yeats distinguishes two kinds of love — the admiration drawn by youth and beauty, and the rarer devotion that survives their loss — and quietly stakes his claim to the second.
Love and the Soul
Yeats sets worldly admiration against spiritual devotion. Many loved her “with love false or true,” but one man “loved the pilgrim soul in you.” The phrase suggests both a journeying spirit and an enduring one — perhaps a nod to Maud Gonne’s fierce independence and nationalist conviction. Crucially, this love extends to “the sorrows of your changing face”: it accepts decline rather than worshipping bloom. This is love as recognition, not conquest.
Perspective and Tone
The poem’s power lies in its future tense. The speaker doesn’t describe a present courtship; he imagines its aftermath, decades on, when the beloved will finally grasp what she let pass. The tone stays wistful and dignified — no pleading, no reproach — which turns what could be bitterness into something closer to prophecy. Regret is offered to her, gently, as a gift she will one day open.
Imagery and Symbolism
The poem moves from hearth to heavens. It opens in domestic stillness — grey hair, a nodding head, the glowing fire — and ends in cosmic distance, with personified Love pacing the mountains and hiding among the stars. That ascent from earthly to celestial mirrors the emotional arc: mortal aging gives way to something that outlives desire. The fleeing Love becomes an emblem of transcendence, a feeling too large for the room it was born in.
Form and Structure
The poem’s restraint is built into its shape. Yeats writes three quatrains of iambic pentameter rhymed ABBA — the enclosed, “envelope” rhyme that opens the Petrarchan sonnet, a quiet signal of the sonnet tradition the poem grows from. The measured symmetry lends the lines the inevitability of a remembered melody, and the form enacts the theme: orderly, reflective, and governed throughout by the passage of time.
Historical Context
Yeats wrote “When You Are Old” in October 1891, at twenty-six, and published it in his 1893 collection The Rose. He was in love with the actress and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, who would refuse his proposals for the rest of his life and remain his lifelong muse. The poem is a free adaptation of Pierre de Ronsard’s sixteenth-century sonnet “Quand vous serez bien vieille,” from Sonnets pour Hélène (1578). Yeats kept Ronsard’s premise — an aging woman recalling a poet’s devotion — but dropped its carpe diem urging in favour of a gentler meditation on inner beauty and love that endures.
In Popular Culture
The poem has had a long afterlife on screen and in song:
In the 1986 film Peggy Sue Got Married, a young poet recites “When You Are Old” to Kathleen Turner’s character, threading the poem’s vision of love remembered through the film’s time-travel romance.
Nashville songwriter Gretchen Peters released “When You Are Old” in 1996, a country song written in tribute to Yeats’s poem that reached the US country charts.
Cartoonist Julian Peters adapted the poem into an illustrated comic in 2012, depicting Yeats himself as the figure of Love who flees “amid a crowd of stars.”
Related Poems
If this poem moves you, these explore kindred ground:
- Remember by Christina Rossetti: A sonnet that, like Yeats’s poem, asks the beloved to hold a memory after love and life have slipped away.
- Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare: The classic statement of a love that “alters not” with time or fading beauty — the ideal Yeats’s speaker quietly claims. (check)
- How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A devoted reckoning of love meant to outlast death itself. (check)
- The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W. B. Yeats: More of Yeats’s early lyric voice, with the same longing for a peace just out of reach.