When You Are Old

In many ways, Yeats embodied the complexity of Ireland at the turn of the century, and his writings tapped into that intersection between English and Irish traditions. He was born into a protestant, Anglo-Irish family, then a minority in Ireland, but did not share the idea that he was essentially an Englishman in Ireland. Instead, he embraced his Irish nationality, often drawing on Irish legends, heroes, and Celtic myth in his poetry and plays, even when writing in London in his early years. His poetry was similarly influenced by English poets, such as John Donne, Edmund Spencer, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. However, his many friendships and associations with other authors and Irish nationalists in the 1890s solidified his enduring project to create identifiably Irish content. At the time that he published The Rose (1893), he developed a deep interest in the occult and joined a secret society that performed magic rituals. Yet, these beliefs did not heavily penetrate his poetry; on the contrary, Yeats often relied on familiar traditions and everyday images, focusing on craftsmanship, structure and the aesthetic of the work. “When You Are Old” reflects many of these intersecting influences in his life, from the neatly metered structure of the poem and its sonnet-like form, to the mystical temporal shifts between past, present, and future that conclude with a classical