20 pages • 40 minutes read
William Butler YeatsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem consists of three stanzas of four lines each. Technically, these stanzas are quatrains, because they consist of four lines. Similar in structure and meter to a sonnet, a traditional love poem, Yeats uses iambic pentameter in “When You Are Old,” but does not finish the poem with a couplet that would put the poem at fourteen lines. Iambic pentameter is a line that has 10 syllables in it, with 5 metric “feet,” or small groups of syllables paired together. For example, in the first line of the poem, the second syllable of the foot takes the emphasis:
When you | are old | and grey | and full | of sleep,
Overall, Yeats’s use of traditional, formal structure that deploys a highly recognizable meter signals to the reader that he is engaging with a tradition of more courtly love poems. However, as noted earlier, with the loss of the final couplet that would make this poem a sonnet, Yeats likewise signals that the love that is central to this poem has similarly been ‘cut short,’ as it flees from the beloved to the stars.
By William Butler Yeats
Among School Children
William Butler Yeats
A Prayer for My Daughter
William Butler Yeats
A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka
William Butler Yeats
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
William Butler Yeats
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
William Butler Yeats
Death
William Butler Yeats
Easter, 1916
William Butler Yeats
Leda and the Swan
William Butler Yeats
No Second Troy
William Butler Yeats
Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
William Butler Yeats