When You Are Old is a poem written by William Butler Yeats in 1893. This is a passionate and sincere love poem, which was dedicated by Ye Zhi to his friend Maud Gunny. The whole poem is divided into three sections.
The first part begins with a hypothetical adverbial of time. The poet imagines an elderly lover reading a collection of poems by the fire a few years later. She was covered with frost and sat alone, but she was not alone, because Ye Zhi's poems accompanied her. When she recites it gently, she will recall everything in the past, her beautiful eyes, soft light and deep halo.
The second section is the focus of the whole poem, and the poet skillfully uses the method of contrast to express his deep affection. "How many people like your beauty, hypocrisy or sincerity when you are young and happy? Only one person loves your pilgrim's soul and the painful wrinkles on your aging face. "
The third section turns to the future virtual artistic conception. The poet's language is as gentle as down, gently guiding lovers to enter just to visit in advance. When you are old, your hair is gray, your face is no longer bright, your body is bent, and you take a nap by the fire, but I still feel heartache for your aging and still ring the bell of love for you, then you will understand me.
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Perhaps the most important tension in the poem When You Are Old comes from or constructs the theme of this poem: the insurmountable gap between love in reality and love in ideal.
The poet lost the real love for the imaginary love, because the real love can't stand being destroyed, and only the imaginary love can last forever and be surrounded by a circle of shining poems forever. However, the more imaginative and ideal things are, the less powerful they are. In order to realize love, imagination should give way to reality. What a sad paradox this is!
The poet realized the universal and identical experience of all mankind from his personal feelings, and realized the transcendence of life and the world. It reveals the insurmountable distance between real love and ideal love.