When You Are Old Essay Questions

Discuss this poem's form, meter, and rhyme scheme.

This work consists of three stanzas, each of which contains four lines, called quatrains. Each quatrain follows an ABBA rhyme scheme, and each line is written in iambic pentameter. The overall effect is of predictability balanced with naturalism. Iambic pentameter is a consistent meter, but also the one most closely related to natural English speech—meanwhile, the ABBA rhyme scheme is similarly consistent, but resolves only after four full lines, making it feel less contrived and songlike than a similar AABB rhyme scheme. This causes the poem to feel natural and intimate, while nevertheless mimicking the predictability and sameness evoked in Yeats's description of old age.

How does the motif of domesticity appear in this poem?

When the poem's speaker imagines his lover's future, he pictures her in a scene of over-the-top domestic comfort. The poem is studded with symbols of this domesticity, most notably the hearth beside which the imagined addressee nods off. This contrasts intensely with the mountains and stars described in the poem's closing lines. "Love fled" into this outdoor setting, the speaker explains—in this way associating love with the danger, beauty, and adventure of wilderness. The aged addressee, alienated from love, instead inhabits a boring but safe indoor shelter.