When you are old When you are old
---William Butler Yeats——William Butler Yeats
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, When you are old, your hair is gray, and your sleep is heavy,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book, Sitting tiredly by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; of vignette.
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true, Or true love,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face; The traces of time on the face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled murmured,
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And paced upon the mountains overhead How love passes, and how it steps up the mountains,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. How he hid his face among the stars.
"When You Are Old" is a poem written by William Butler Yeats in 1893. It is a passionate and sincere love poem Yeats dedicated to his girlfriend Maut Gonne. The language of the poem is concise, but the emotions are rich and real. The poet used a variety of artistic expression techniques. The article reproduces the poet's undying love for his girlfriend through an in-depth analysis of the artistic expression techniques used by the poet in the poem, such as hypothesis and imagination, contrast and contrast, image emphasis, and symbolic sublimation. It reveals the unbridgeable distance between real love and ideal love.
Creative background: On January 30, 1889, the 23-year-old Yeats met the beautiful actress Maud Gonne for the first time. She was 22 years old and a resident. The daughter of a British colonel in Ireland recently inherited a large inheritance after her father passed away. Maud Gonne was not only extraordinarily beautiful and slender, but also, after feeling the tragic situation of the Irish people being oppressed by the British, she began to sympathize with the Irish people and resolutely gave up the social life of Dublin's upper class and devoted herself to the struggle for Irish national independence. Come to the movement and become one of the leaders. This added a special halo to Maud Gonne in Yeats's mind.