W. B. Yeats’s Poetry of Aging

Throughout his life aging was more than a theme in the poetry of W. B. Yeats—it was an obsession. He confessed that himself on more than one occasion, such as when he was revising his collected lyric poetry for the never published Coole Edition of his works in 1932. Having just turned sixty-seven, Yeats wrote to his early lover and lifetime friend, Olivia Shakespear: “I spend my days correcting proofs. I have just finished the first volume of all my lyric poetry & am greatly astonished at myself. . . . I keep saying what man is this who . . . says the same thing in so many different ways. My first denunciation of old age I made in ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’ (end of part 1) before I was twenty & the same denunciation comes in the last pages of the book. The swordsman throughout repudiates the saint, but not without vacillation.”

That preoccupation runs straight through his individual poetic volumes, from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) to his posthumous Last Poems (1940). It appears not only in individual poems but also in Yeats’s architectonic arrangement of his volumes, which often begin and end with poems concerning aging and death; such as his most powerful volume, The Tower (1928), which begins with “Sailing to Byzantium” and closes with “All Souls’ Night.” The first poem starts with the famous line “That is no country for old men,” whether that is Ireland, nature, or even life itself; the last poem conjures figures from life while calling up “mummy truths,” a phrase that signifies ambivalence toward the escape sought in the volume’s first poem.

Yet, if the idea of aging haunted Yeats throughout his career, his treatment of it in both theme and technique changed over time, growing steadily deeper and more powerful. “As I altered my syntax I altered my intellect,” he wrote in 1937 at the age of seventy-two while once again looking back over his own development. How could it be otherwise, since in poetry how something is said is what is said? Protesting against old age in the derivative language of late Victorian romanticism was one thing, but doing so in the reinvigorated language and form of early twentieth-century modernism was something else.

Yeats’s thoughts on that development came to a climax in his immediate reaction to receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature medal at the awards ceremony in Stockholm in 1923. Reaching his chair after a harrowing ascent sideways according to protocol, he paused to contemplate the medal he had just been awarded, which pictured a young man listening to a young and beautiful muse. “I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were,” he declared. “Now I am old and rheumatic, and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young.” That young vigorous muse of his old age inspired the answering vigorous power of his mature poetry, and his development can be seen in the changing manner of his frequent mourning of lost beauty and beauties. He learned to replace the early languid rhythm of these lines from “The Meditation of the Old Fisherman” (1886, when Yeats was twenty-one)—“Proud maidens, ye are not so fair, when his oar / Is heard on the water, as they were, the proud and apart”—with the more powerful lament near the end of “The Tower” (1927, in his early sixties)—the “death / Of every brilliant eye / That made a catch in the breath.” The later passage avoids archaisms like ye in favor of more dynamic and active phrasing, the impassioned syntax of its enjambed lines, its kinetic economy, and the wonderful synecdoche of “every brilliant eye,” a phrase so resonant that the contemporary American mystery writer Loren Estleman co-opted it for a thriller title. I should like to trace that process more fully, passing from the early poems to the later ones, when Yeats was experiencing the process of aging with its inevitable losses but also with what another great poet of aging, William Wordsworth...