Today’s poem is chosen and introduced by Mr Galloway.

I imagine many of you have spent a lot of time wondering when all of this will end and what the future may look like. In the poem I’ve selected today, the speaker of the poem encourages us to look far into the future and consider how we’ll remember our current selves. A flash-forward/flash-back, if you will.

In particular, the poet (W.B. Yeats) focuses on the feeling of love. He imagines an old woman picking up a book of poetry (including this poem), dreaming of the beauty of her youth and how one person in particular loved her more than any other. There’s regret, hope, pain, loss and so much more going on here. Is it about love? Is it about poetry and art? Is it an urge to ‘seize the day’? Is it a mournful lamentation?

When we’re all sitting by the fire in our old age, how will we look back on our lives?

A relevant biographical note: W.B. Yeats spent much of his life hopelessly in love with a formidable woman called Maud Gonne (a committed Irish republican, actress and suffragette). She turned down many proposals of marriage, including four from Yeats himself, and she eventually married someone else. Many of W.B. Yeats’ poems focus on his unrequited love for Maud, which he thought more pure and powerful than anything else.

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.