When You Are Old

The poem consists of three stanzas of four lines each. Technically, these stanzas are quatrains, because they consist of four lines. Similar in structure and meter to a sonnet, a traditional love poem, Yeats uses iambic pentameter in “When You Are Old,” but does not finish the poem with a couplet that would put the poem at fourteen lines. Iambic pentameter is a line that has 10 syllables in it, with 5 metric “feet,” or small groups of syllables paired together. For example, in the first line of the poem, the second syllable of the foot takes the emphasis:

When you | are old | and grey | and full | of sleep,

Overall, Yeats’s use of traditional, formal structure that deploys a highly recognizable meter signals to the reader that he is engaging with a tradition of more courtly love poems. However, as noted earlier, with the loss of the final couplet that would make this poem a sonnet, Yeats likewise signals that the love that is central to this poem has similarly been ‘cut short,’ as it flees from the beloved to the stars.