In "The Mountain," Elizabeth Bishop presents old age as an experience of profound alienation—from oneself, from one's physical and sensory surroundings, and from the broader social world. This alienation has sensory, interior aspects: deteriorating eyesight and hearing, combined with what seems like reduced mobility and memory, cause the speaker to feel cut off from her surroundings. It also has social aspects: in response to the speaker's changing condition, she feels, others ignore or impugn her, which exacerbates her sense of aloneness. Poets have approached the theme of aging from a wide variety of perspectives, at times writing from the point of view of an older person speaking to a younger one, or from the point of view of a younger person imagining their old age. Here, we'll look at how a few other poets have tackled the theme of aging.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Youth and Age" is written from the perspective of an older speaker attempting to understand and negotiate his relationship to his own youth. Coleridge was a prominent Romantic writer, and the Romantic movement in general wrote about youth as a period of vitality and untrammeled, passionate wisdom. In "Youth and Age," Coleridge's speaker argues that these youthful attitudes are still attainable in old age, and that the mind can remain young, flexible, and passionate regardless of the body's aging. The speaker is no longer young, but he maintains a relationship to his younger self, looking upon him with admiration rather than alienation. "That Youth and I are house-mates still," he announces. In this way, Coleridge's perspective differs from Bishop's: her speaker describes aging as an all-encompassing, almost vertiginous experience that affects the body, mind, and wider society in unison, whole Coleridge imagines it as a physical process that can be separated from mental, emotional, and social ones.
W.B. Yeats's "When You Are Old" approaches aging through a complex, knotty timeline. The poem is narrated by a (relatively) young speaker, addressing a beloved. This speaker imagines his lover as an elderly woman, projecting into the future. Then, adding to the work's complexity, he instructs this older, future version of his beloved to look back wistfully on memories of their youthful relationship. "And bending down beside the glowing bars,/Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled," the speaker narrates. In this case, the speaker uses old age as a kind of imaginative setting, through which to contextualize, appreciate, and mourn his (still-ongoing) youth. In this poem's depiction, old age is an experience of tranquility and perspective, but at the necessary cost of youthful excitement and passion.
Sylvia Plath's "Mirror," meanwhile, echoes Bishop's poem in its use of surreal, fantastical imagery. The work is written from the point of view of a mirror. The mirror describes a young woman who gazes into it, looking at her reflection. She is distressed by what she sees: the mirror observes that the woman "rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands." Her distress seems to stem from paranoia about and fear of aging. "In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish," the mirror says. Here, a young person's fear of aging actually subsumes their youth, causing her to spend that youth dwelling on her impending age. This poem in particular examines the intersections of age and gender, examining how the beauty standards placed on the young woman rob her of her youth and simultaneously cause her to see old age as disastrous.
Each of these poets, then, takes a different approach to the question of aging. Bishop discusses old age as lonely and profoundly confusing. Her speaker is alienated from others by aging, but she is also alienated from herself. Coleridge, on the other hand, rejects the idea of old age as a lonely period: in his poem, the young and the old version of the speaker actually offer one another company. In Yeats's depiction, meanwhile, old age does bring loneliness, separating the two lovers—but this loneliness comes with a certain serenity, making it a natural counterbalance to all-consuming youthful love. Finally, in Plath's poem, the speaker again becomes alienated from herself. She obsesses over her impending age, to such a degree that her current body is forgotten. Here, however, it is not age itself that causes this alienation, but rather the fear of aging.
