Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats gives you beauty, then immediately stages its disappearance. The line opens on "I heard", a listener’s posture that matters: this isn’t a private epiphany but a report from the mouth of "old, old, men", tradition incarnate, repeating itself until it hardens into doctrine. Their claim arrives as folk wisdom - not argued, just pronounced - which is exactly how the most corrosive ideas about time and loss travel: as something everyone supposedly already knows.

"All that's beautiful" is deliberately sweeping, but Yeats doesn’t leave it as a platitude. He turns beauty into motion: it "drifts away", not shatters, not is stolen. Drift suggests inevitability without villainy, a slow exit that can’t be wrestled back. The simile "like the waters" sharpens the fatalism. Water is the perfect image for time in Yeats: continuous, reflective, impossible to grip. It implies that the very medium we live in is what carries beauty off. There’s also a quiet cruelty in choosing water rather than wind or fire; water comforts even as it erases.

The deeper subtext is Yeats’s lifelong argument with transience. He wants permanence - in art, in love, in national myth - yet he’s too honest (and too modern) to pretend the world holds still. By ventriloquizing elders, he dramatizes how aging colonizes perception: you start to hear your future spoken in advance. The line doesn’t just mourn; it warns that nostalgia can be inherited, and that the stories we tell about beauty may be shaped less by what we’ve seen than by what we’ve already lost.