Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats stages a love poem as a time machine with teeth: he doesn’t plead to be chosen now, he scripts the scene in which the beloved will be forced to remember. The opening image is domestic and almost tenderly dull - old age as “full of sleep,” a body surrendering to gravity, a life reduced to nodding by the fire. Then he plants his weapon: the book. Not a perfume, not a keepsake, but a text to be “slowly read,” as if the only way back to desire is through his words. He’s writing himself into her future, making literature a rival to time.

The genius is in the second-person address. Yeats isn’t describing aging; he’s commanding it, turning the beloved into a reader-character who will one day sit inside his imagined tableau. “Dream of the soft look your eyes had once” sounds like compliment, but it’s also a quiet indictment: your beauty was real, and it passed; you didn’t recognize what it meant while you had it. The “shadows deep” complicate the portrait. This isn’t a clean Hallmark nostalgia for youth. Shadows suggest depth, secrecy, maybe sadness - the emotional gravity Yeats always wanted from beauty, not just its surface light.

Context matters: Yeats wrote obsessively about Maud Gonne, the muse who repeatedly refused him. This passage smuggles that biographical ache into a broader argument about art’s afterlife. He can’t win her in the present, so he wins by outlasting it: when the face is gone, the poem remains, insisting that the truest mirror of who she was lives in the lines she once ignored.