Summary
The poem begins with the speaker asking an unnamed listener to imagine a future in which she is elderly, dozing off by the fireplace. He instructs his listener, in this faraway future, to get up and start reading through "this book," which is to say, the book containing this poem. As she reads, he instructs, she should dream about the way she appeared in the past, especially the soft, shadowed look of her eyes. He urges this future version of his addressee to remember how many people loved her for her pleasing manner, her gracefulness, and her beauty. Some people loved her truly and selflessly, while others loved her more shallowly. One man, however, loved her in a different way. This man—who is clearly the speaker himself—also loved the listener's "pilgrim soul," as well as the sadness that sometimes showed on her face.
The speaker tells his listener that, after reading the book containing the poem, she should bend down over the fireplace and murmur out loud, a little bit sadly, about the loss of her love. Specifically, the speaker urges her to remember how "love fled." Love, he says in a fantastical series of images, ran away to live and hide among the mountains and the stars, disappearing from the listener's life.
Analysis
This poem appears relatively simple in its content: one individual reminiscing about a relationship, and asking his lover not to forget the relationship. But a careful reading reveals the complexity and strangeness of the work's premise. It begins in the speaker's present, but the speaker immediately projects forward through time: the poem's opening word is "when," marking the push from the present into the imagined future. Although he is imagining the future, he is offering instruction to the current version of his lover. He directs her to behave in a certain way—not now, at the moment of address, but later, in her old age. Having clarified this, the speaker then tells his lover to "take down this book," in a whimsical moment of metatextuality. Even as he appears to be in the process of writing down a poem, the speaker imagines the poem's future within a book. The speaker's instructions to his listener—in which he urges her to peruse his poem—are only accessible within the poem itself. The line is paradoxical, and through paradox, it knits together present and future inextricably. The poem seems to exist, in equal measure, in the "now" and in the future. It becomes a conduit between the speaker in the present and the lover of the future, so that the speaker's voice appears to reach through time.
While the poem begins with this complicated trip through time, its imagery, meter, and rhyme scheme offer a feeling of ease and even coziness. Yeats opts to use the most common, conversational-sounding meter in English—iambic pentameter. Lines of iambic pentameter contain ten syllables, with the stress falling on every second syllable. Through using this meter, Yeats creates a consistent rhythm, but also mimics the sound of spontaneous speech. This creates a feeling of informal intimacy as well as easy predictability. Meanwhile, an ABBA rhyme scheme performs a similar function. The rhyme left open by the first line of each stanza is neatly closed off by the fourth, resolving suspense and tension and creating a feeling of ease. Perhaps most striking are Yeats's imagistic choices. He packs the poem, especially the first stanza, with images of a woman sleeping and reading by a fireplace. These cozy, domestic scenes border on the cliché. Why does Yeats choose to veer so close to a cliché of domesticity?
One explanation for Yeats's choice of imagery, and for his cultivation of a homey, predictable mood, is that it creates a compelling contrast with the passionate love described in the poem. In the second half of the first stanza, Yeats once again complicates the poem's timeline, by asking the future version of his listener to remember the past—and specifically to remember her relationship with the speaker. Yeats, therefore, suggests that the lover will look back with nostalgia and distance on a youthful romance. The romance is depicted as one of emotional intensity and sheer busyness. Many people, the speaker explains, are in love with the poem's addressee—and, to add to this eventful scenario, these suitors include both sincere and selfish admirers. Moreover, the addressee herself is a figure of constant change. She has a "changing face" and a "pilgrim soul." With these changes, Yeats suggests that the speaker loves this addressee because she is full of movement, dynamism, and a somewhat melancholy or dissatisfied disposition. This differs vastly from the unchanging, satisfied shelter of the poem's (imagined) old age, emphasizing the nostalgic and somewhat regretful relationship the future lover may have to her youthful self.
It is not explicitly stated, during the poem's first two stanzas, whether or not the speaker and his addressee remain together in old age. In the third stanza, however, it is made clear that they are in fact parted, emotionally if not physically. When the imagined future lover remembers the past, she is reminiscing not only about being young and in love, but about the entire, now-gone relationship between herself and the speaker. The speaker's description of the relationship's end is enigmatic. The poem's description of love fleeing to pace the mountains and hide in the stars may be entirely metaphorical, or it may be a literal description of a departure into the wilderness. Left equally open is the question of why love has fled. Perhaps the speaker has chosen to depart, or else has been forced to. It may also be the case that the speaker remains present, but that love itself—in an emotional sense—has degraded and disappeared with the lovers' aging. What is clear, however, is that the speaker's vision of the future is a sad one, in which even devoted love fades away, leaving behind nostalgia.
