Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

Cooley’s line lands like a dry punchline with a bruise underneath: the great literary “progression” from youthful romance to aged mortality is basically a costume change. He frames poets as complainers with better diction, “bewailing” in both cases, which is his sly way of deflating the supposed nobility of either subject. Love and time aren’t opposites here; they’re the same loss wearing different makeup.

The trick is the hinge phrase, “surprisingly little difference.” It reads like a calm correction to a sentimental myth: that young art is all heart and old art is all wisdom. Cooley suggests the emotional engine stays constant. Young poets mourn love’s disappearance because love is how they first experience time’s power - the relationship ends, and suddenly the world has a “before” and “after.” Old poets mourn time because time has become the mechanism that takes everything, including love, with less drama and more certainty.

Subtextually, he’s also taking a shot at poetic ego. The poet likes to believe the subject evolves toward profundity; Cooley implies it just narrows toward the same ache. The line fits his broader aphoristic sensibility: skeptical, observant, allergic to grand self-seriousness. Coming from a late-20th-century writer steeped in modern disillusionment, it feels like a post-romantic update: you can trade sonnets for elegies, but you’re still writing about absence. The “surprise” is that maturity doesn’t rescue you from the old theme; it merely renames it.