Aging & Wisdom Quote by Charles Stuart Calverley

Nostalgia gets punctured here with the kind of deadpan Calverley does best: the speaker strikes a grand, faintly moral pose about abandoning "old songs", then confesses the most banal reason possible - he simply can't remember the tune. The comedy hinges on that bait-and-switch. We expect a principled renunciation ("I deem them low"), the Victorian version of distancing yourself from something embarrassing. Instead, Calverley yanks the ladder away: taste and virtue are just cover stories for mental rust.

The subtext is sharper than the couplet makes it look. Forgetting becomes an anti-heroic form of change, the unglamorous engine behind reinvention. People like to narrate their evolving identities as deliberate upgrades; Calverley suggests they're often accidents of attention, age, and a mind that misplaces its own repertoire. The "old songs" can be literal - parlor music, sentimental favorites, college drinking tunes - but they also stand for habits, friendships, even former selves that were once easy to perform.

Form does a lot of the work. The tight rhyme and sing-song meter mimic the very thing the speaker claims to have lost, turning the poem into a tiny performance of its own argument: he can't recall the songs, yet he produces a catchy little verse about not recalling them. That self-canceling neatness is Calverley's wink. He isn't just mocking moral posturing; he's mocking the human need to dress up ordinary forgetfulness as a story of refined judgment.