"When You Are Old" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats, originally published in the 1893 collection The Rose. The poem features a speaker who addresses an unnamed listener in the second person. This speaker imagines the listener's future, and asks the imagined future addressee to reminisce about their shared past and the failed romance between the two. The work is distinguished by its complex timeline and point of view, as well as by its tonal tension between melancholic tenderness and bitterness.
This work is composed of three quatrains, or four-line stanzas. Each line contains ten syllables of iambic pentameter, and each stanza is written in an ABBA rhyme scheme. These factors, along with the simplicity of its setting and vocabulary, create a sense of intimacy and honesty in the work.
Like most of Yeats's love poetry, this poem was likely addressed to the Irish activist and actress Maud Gonne. Gonne and Yeats had a largely unsuccessful romance, as described in this poem, but their relationship fueled and structured a great deal of Yeats's best-known poetry.
