When You Are Old Literary Elements

An unnamed man, implied to be the poet himself.

Three quatrains of iambic pentameter with an ABBA rhyme scheme

The description of love "pac(ing) upon the mountains overhead / And hid(ing) his face amid a crowd of stars" occupies an ambiguous metaphorical terrain, referring to the disappearance as well as the wildness of love, and perhaps of the lover himself.

The phrase "full of sleep" is a metaphorical depiction of the exhaustion of age.

"glad grace" uses alliterative G sounds. "slowly read, and dream" features assonant "ea" vowels, while "changing face" features alliterative "a" vowels, and "hid his face amid" uses alliterative "i" vowels.

The poem's premise has an irony at its core. Though it is oriented around a vision of the future, it is unexpectedly focused on nostalgia and memory. Moreover, it reflects the ironic reality that age, for the comforting distance it brings, necessarily involves a sacrifice of emotion and passion.

The poem is loosely based on a French sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, though it is not itself a sonnet.

A house or other domestic space, implied to be in twentieth-century Ireland.

Mournful, regretful, bittersweet, melancholy.

Both the speaker and addressee function in both of these roles—each one is the object of love as well as the force destroying it.

The poem's major conflict is between the passion of youthful love and the pragmatic emotional distance of age. It also describes, in oblique terms, a conflict between the speaker and addressee—one that, for reasons that are never named, keeps them apart despite their love.

The poem's climax occurs at line 10, when it is revealed that "love fled" and that the characters' romance has ended unhappily.

The poem's early projection into the future, when the speaker envisions a seemingly nostalgic and lonely addressee, foreshadows the end of their romance.

The poem's emotional orientation is broadly muted and understated, exemplified by the description of the addressee speaking "a little sadly" of lost love.

The poem alludes to the ongoing romance between Yeats and the Irish nationalist and actress Maud Gonne.

The phrase "When you are old and grey" uses "grey" as metonymy, in the sense that the addressee's hair color stands in for a description of her whole person. "Love" may be used as meyonymy, depending on one's interpretation—it is possible to read "love fled" as a description of the lover fleeing, with the emotion "love" standing in for the person himself.

While "Love" can be understood as metonymy, the line "love fled" and the pronoun "he" being used to refer to love may also be read as personification, with the feeling of love being granted humanlike characteristics.

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"Murmur" is an instance of onomatopoeia.