Thoughts on “When You Are Old”

There were a few odd things about this poem that struck me as I read it, and I have yet to figure out. The poem follows an off-set rhyme style of A B B A, with three stanzas and a steady tempo, but what struck me the most about it was the choice of words and tone, which seem to almost contradict one another in a few places. On the first line of the the second stanza, Yeats sets a dismal and almost melancholy tone as he writes, “How many loved your moments of glad grace” (Yeats 1703). However later in the poem in the second stanza, he reverses that tone when he writes that “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you” (Yeats 1703). The contrast between these two lines seems quite severe for them to come from the same stanza, as the first one (and indeed the first stanza as well), seem to indicate lost chances and border on hopelessness, yet the third line of the second stanza seems to stand out as a positive note in an otherwise sad story. The speaker’s word choice also seems to stand out in the last stanza, where love is capitalized in the middle of a sentence, and love is given a male identity. It seems that the poem is written about a woman, but even so it just struck me as odd that love (which is normally considered feminine), was described as male, and capitalized out of place.