“When You Are Old” is obviously a very romantic poem but it is also about aging.
The poem ” When You Are Old” is a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeast, which the speaker directly addresses someone else and asks this person to imagine old age, a time of grey hair and general tiredness. This is bittersweet poem that revels the complexities of love. The poem has a fairly bleak outlook on aging, with the speaker suggesting to the addressee that life will grow sadder and lonelier as youthful beauty fades away. throughout the poem the speaker is emphasizing on beauty of the addressee and how her future will look like . The speaker also hinting that the addressee has so many lovers because of her youthful and beauty which she many not have when she gets older and paler, and that she has to enjoy her young age before she gets old.
I agree that this poem is about the complexities of love and aging. I would like to add that the speaker of this poem is also confessing his eternal love for the lady. The poem implies that he still loves her despite her growing old because he loves her soul rather than her external beauty, which is temporary. The last stanza of the poem also implies how sad love is because he will love her even when she’s old and no longer beautiful, unlike all these other men, yet she did not love him back.