Yeats Essay Help!!!!!

[RebekahSquillace]

I am doing When You Are Old by Yeats and my question is:

To what extent has your personal response to the poetry been shaped by the enduring power of Yeats’ poetic treatment of age and youth?
Support your evaluation with a close analysis of ONE poem by Yeats.

Can someone please help me to understand the question and possibly how to answer it/structure it?

[elysepopplewell]

I am doing When You Are Old by Yeats and my question is:

To what extent has your personal response to the poetry been shaped by the enduring power of Yeats’ poetic treatment of age and youth?
Support your evaluation with a close analysis of ONE poem by Yeats.

Can someone please help me to understand the question and possibly how to answer it/structure it?

Hey!

When You Are Old is one of the simplest poems we are given, which makes it so hard to analyse. Compared to say, the Second Coming, there are so few apparent layers in When You Are Old.

I think the age and youth theme is very strong in this poem.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire,

In this first description, we have such feeble and elderly imagery. He literally says she's old, and grey has connotations, and full of sleep implies she's close to death.

He also tells her to, "and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once"

The past tense of her eyes shows that youth has fled. He is reminding her of a youth she no longer has.

Yet, because the poem  is "when you are..." as in, in the future, rather than "right now, because you are old" we can deduct that he has written this in advance of her ageing, so he is right now. He is foreseeing her ageing and hoping, in some ways, for her regret that she (Maud) didn't accept and love him in return