Aging & Wisdom Quote by Carolyn Wells

Wells treats the usual life-stage melodrama like a parlor joke with teeth. Youth, in her telling, isn’t tragic or romantic; it’s “silly” and “vapid,” a pair of adjectives that puncture the era’s sentimental worship of innocence and fresh beginnings. Old age doesn’t get the noble glow-up either. It’s “rife” with “fears and ills” - an almost bookkeeping phrase that makes decline sound less like a grand finale and more like an accumulating list of charges.

The punchline is the poem’s real critique: the speaker doesn’t ask for eternal youth (the classic wish) but for “a thousand years of Middle Life,” a deliberately absurd extension of the one period culture tends to treat as least poetic. Middle life is where responsibilities sit, where desire has to negotiate with rent, work, and bodies that are still mostly cooperative. By framing that as the “simple boon,” Wells skewers the fantasy market of her time - the breathless promises of rejuvenation, moral purity, or dignified aging - and replaces it with a cooler, more pragmatic appetite: continuity.

Context matters here. Wells wrote in the late 19th and early 20th century, a period obsessed with progress, self-improvement, and “scientific” solutions to human limits. Her rhyme and meter echo light verse, but the subtext isn’t light at all: the dream is not transcendence, it’s postponement. The irony lands because it’s recognizable - most people don’t actually want to be 18 forever or 88 forever; they want the bandwidth of the in-between, stretched impossibly wide.