greykit.poetry — #aging
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1928
[w-b-yeats]
Sailing to Byzantium
Yeats leaves the country of the young and sensual — dying generations caught in their music — and sails to the holy city of Byzantium, asking its gold-mosaic sages to gather him out of nature into the artifice of eternity, a hammered golden bird singing of what is past, or passing, or to come.
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1919
[w-b-yeats]
The Wild Swans at Coole
On his nineteenth October at Coole Park, Yeats counts fifty-nine swans and watches them mount and scatter — unwearied, their hearts not grown old — and wonders where they will delight men's eyes when he wakes to find they have flown away.
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1892
[w-b-yeats]
When You Are Old
Told to a woman who is still young: one day, nodding by the fire, take down this book and remember that one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and the sorrows of your changing face.
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1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold
Three images of ending — bare boughs where the birds sang, the twilight after sunset, a fire dying on the ashes of its own youth — arrive at the paradox that seeing the end makes the love stronger: to love that well which thou must leave ere long.