"Youth is a silly, vapid state, Old age with fears and ills is rife; This simple boon I beg of Fate - A thousand years of Middle Life"
About this Quote
Carolyn Wells distills a lifetime of ambivalence into four brisk lines, setting youth and old age as equally undesirable poles and casting the middle years as the sweet, enviable interval. Youth is dismissed as silly and vapid, a season of bright energy but poor judgment; old age is shadowed by fear and bodily trouble. Between frivolity and frailty, the speaker petitions Fate for what sounds modest but is deliberately impossible: a thousand years of Middle Life. The hyperbole is the joke and the point. It mocks the human habit of seeking exceptions to time while confessing a genuine longing for equilibrium.
Form sharpens the wit. The ABAB rhyme yokes state to Fate and rife to life, pairing descriptions with their imagined remedy. The dash after beg of Fate creates a theatrical pause before the audacious wish. Capitalizing Middle Life elevates it from a mere demographic bracket to an idealized condition, almost a proper noun. The poem is epigrammatic, quick, and pointed, true to Wells’s talent for light verse that marries clarity with sting.
Beneath the levity runs a classical impulse toward the golden mean. Wells embraces moderation as a virtue: middle age promises vigor without recklessness, wisdom without debility, desire tempered by discretion. It is a sly rebuke to youth-worship and a refusal to romanticize decline. Yet the speaker’s self-awareness prevents smugness. Calling the request a simple boon highlights the irony; nothing could be less simple than suspending mortality.
Written by an American humorist who thrived in the early 20th century’s magazine culture, the stanza fits a tradition of urbane, compressive poetry from Horace to Dorothy Parker. Its charm lies in how it flatters common sense while acknowledging the vanity of wishing against time. The pleasure is bittersweet: we recognize the wish as impossible, and we wish it anyway.
Form sharpens the wit. The ABAB rhyme yokes state to Fate and rife to life, pairing descriptions with their imagined remedy. The dash after beg of Fate creates a theatrical pause before the audacious wish. Capitalizing Middle Life elevates it from a mere demographic bracket to an idealized condition, almost a proper noun. The poem is epigrammatic, quick, and pointed, true to Wells’s talent for light verse that marries clarity with sting.
Beneath the levity runs a classical impulse toward the golden mean. Wells embraces moderation as a virtue: middle age promises vigor without recklessness, wisdom without debility, desire tempered by discretion. It is a sly rebuke to youth-worship and a refusal to romanticize decline. Yet the speaker’s self-awareness prevents smugness. Calling the request a simple boon highlights the irony; nothing could be less simple than suspending mortality.
Written by an American humorist who thrived in the early 20th century’s magazine culture, the stanza fits a tradition of urbane, compressive poetry from Horace to Dorothy Parker. Its charm lies in how it flatters common sense while acknowledging the vanity of wishing against time. The pleasure is bittersweet: we recognize the wish as impossible, and we wish it anyway.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
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