Blog numero dos "When You Are Old"

                W.B. Yeats is a master craftsman when it comes to poetry and shows his talent in "When You Are Old."  Yeats uses many allusions in his poems and the title of this poem is an allusion to a sonnet by French poet Pierre de Ronsard.  This particular poem attracted me because of the theme of nostalgia and dreams of the distant past.  In this brief poem so much is said through few words about how memories of joyful moments never leave the human mind.  Stanza one is a statement that old age will inherently come to everyone alive and by that point we will learn the value of time by taking every action slowly.  We will cherish every fleeting moment with the passage of  time with pleasant memories of events or loved-ones.  This poem in particular is talking about someone, most likely a woman, who has engraved her image of beauty and frivolous  personality into the mind of the speaker.  However, near the end it seems that Yeats is saying that some memories must remain in the past because of the pain it might cause in the present.