When You Are Old William Butler Yeats

Understanding the Craft Behind "When You Are Old"

The poem sits in the public domain now, so you can read it, analyze it, quote it, or build teaching materials around it without worrying about permissions. That said, it's still widely anthologized and assigned in literature courses, which means there's a real ecosystem of secondary sources, recordings, and scholarly commentary you can tap into if you're working on an essay or lesson plan.

I ran into a practical snag last year when I was preparing a close-reading handout for an undergrad seminar. I wanted to include the original 1893 version from The Countess Kathleen and Several Legends alongside the slightly revised text that appeared in later editions. The difference is minor but meaningful: the first stanza's "pity" versus later prints that sometimes shift the wording around. My workaround was to pull both from the Oxford World's Classics edition, which gives you a clean facing-page comparison, and then cross-reference it with the Yeats Society's transcript at the National Library of Ireland. That saved me from the usual problem of finding a single PDF online that mashes both versions together without clarification.

When You Are Old William Butler Yeats

The poem itself is sixteen lines across four stanzas. Three are four-line stanzas and the final one is a five-line stanza. It's written in loose iambic tetrameter, not a strict metrical form. The rhyme scheme runs a-b-b-a across the first three stanzas and a-b-b-a-c for the last one, which means the closing stanza pulls two lines from the interior rhyme scheme outward, giving the poem its characteristic sense of closure without feeling symmetrical. What most people miss on first read is how deliberately Yeats anchors the poem in a tactile, domestic scene before pivoting to the metaphysical. The opening image of fire and sleep is almost boring — a woman reading by a fire, nodding off, pulling down the book of memories. That's the setup. The emotional work happens in the pivot at the start of the second stanza, where he names the specific kind of love she received versus the love she rejected. "Love fled and upon the mountains drew / His heavy footsteps" is the line that does the heavy lifting. It's not just a farewell; it's a geographical claim. Love becomes something that retreats upward, physically distancing itself from the speaker's position. If you're using this for analysis, pay attention to the volta — the turn — which lands at line nine. The shift from past-tense narrative ("you grow old and gray and sleepy") to present-tense imperative ("and look down and remember") is where the whole poem's ethical argument crystallizes. The speaker isn't just recounting a prophecy about aging. He's issuing a command in the moment, asking the addressee to confront regret as it happens rather than after it's too late.

For the actual text, you can find it in virtually any complete collection of Yeats' poetry. Project Gutenberg has a free copy of the 1905 volume that includes it. The full poem: 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;

P>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 mortal face;

P>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.

A word of caution if you're citing this academically: the "pilgrim soul" line has been endlessly quoted out of context, often stripped of the poem's actual argument about conditional versus unconditional love. Don't treat it as a standalone love declaration. It functions only because it's preceded by "how many loved" — it's a contrast, not a solitary gesture.