Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, May 8th, 2024.

Today's poem is by William Butler Yates, and it's called When You Are Old.

Today, also, incidentally, is the birthday of my wife, Heather.

And so at least two-thirds of this poem I happily dedicate to her.

Here it is once.

I'll say a few words about it and then read it the second time.

When you are old.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,

nodding by the fire, take down this book,

and slowly read and dream of the soft look your eyes had once and of their shadows deep.

How many loved your moments of glad grace and loved your beauty with love, false or true?

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you and loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars

murmur a little sadly how love fled

and paced upon the mountains overhead

and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

This has always been one of my favorite William Butler Yates poems.

And though this is a poem really of lost love, it's still a testimony to the constancy of the lover, if not of the beloved.

Most of Yates's love poems are informed by his own fraught relationship with love and the lifetime of

unrequited love he bore for Mod Gunn, his Beatrice, the unattainable woman that inspired much of his art and constantly,

you know, absorbed his attention and his thought. But the speaker here in the poem,

...