Imagery In When You Are Old By William Butler Yeats

In the poem “When You Are Old,” William Butler Yeats is telling his past lover that once she gets to her old age, she will be regretting and dying alone. Yeats uses metaphorical imagery to buildup a scenario of unavoidable fade to age alone.
Yeats tells her that she will be “old and grey and full of sleep” (line 1). He presents the quality of being old with two metaphors. The color “grey” is associated with the characteristics of being old and the color itself is closely related to the color black, in which both colors associates with death. While she is “grey,” the “fire” (line 2) next to her is red. The combination of the two creates an image where his previous lover’s body gets cremate. The reason being that he directly presents her with …show more content…
By setting the past lover as “grey,” he is presenting the time when she is in her last stage of life. He emphasizes last stage of her life through “full of sleep.” Sleep associates with inactiveness of human body. So when one is “full of sleep,” he or she is given death-like characteristic. By setting her in a late adulthood stage, he is shaping her into a disabled person just like how people are when they age. Yeats immobilizes her as a whole and this is seen throughout the poem. He describes her using two specific actions, which are “nodding” (line 2) and “bending” (line 9). Both “nodding” and “bending” have similar connotation because both actions set a person in downward positions. While “nodding” creates an image where an old lady is half asleep while her head keeps falling forward, “bending” creates an image where her spinal is being compressed. Both actions are characteristics that an old person would have. Yeats specifically uses these action to create a disabled version of his past …show more content…
Yeats uses a specific item, “glowing bars,” to depict an image of being unable to escape from dying. The “fire” in the first stanza is now “glowing” by the third stanza. “Glowing” has the effect of evanescent fire. The transitional imagery, an actual fire to fire slowly dying down, shows that even the flame next her will die down at some point, which reflects her situation of slowly dying. The reason being that because she is “old and grey” and will eventually deteriorate just like what happened to the fire next to her. On the other hand, the language of the “bars” displays a similar connotation to prison bars. With the combinations of two words, he directly creates a metaphorical imagery to depict her fade where she is being trapped to die in