#POEMS ABOUT GROWING UP FULL#

The twelfth-century Chinese poet, Lu Yu, offers this portrait of the old man in his poem 'Written in a Carefree Mood': Poems on aging are rarely jubilant, but there are those that cast old age in a more tender light. There was, however, one oversight: Eos forgot to ask that along with immortality Tithanus be granted eternal youth, leaving him in a never-ending prison of old age. Lord Alfred Tennyson approached the topic with irony, basing his poem 'Tithanus' on the plight of the Greek mortal who was granted immortality by Zeus thanks to his lover, the goddess Eos. How far the unknown transcends the what we know. Our playthings one by one, and by the hand 'Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning,' wrote Czeslaw Milosz in 'Late Ripeness.' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his poem 'Nature,' compares the old to a child who must 'leave his broken playthings on the floor' and go to bed: William Shakespeare saw death as a welcome deliverance from life’s countless blows in his 'Tired With All These, For Restful Death I Cry.' Other poets view their final years with a kind of Zen-like calm. Out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted To look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night Mathew Arnold’s 'Growing Old' also provides a morose portrait of old age:Īnd not once feel that we were ever young.īilly Collins suggests the losses of old age through one of its seemingly benign symptoms-forgetfulness:Īs if, one by one, the memories you used to harborĭecided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain.

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

#POEMS ABOUT GROWING UP FULL#

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,Īnd nodding by the fire, take down this book,Īnd slowly read, and dream of the soft look William Butler Yeats’s 'When You Are Old' depicts old age with regret: Some poets yearn for their youth or pity their shriveling bodies. Most view aging as a loss-of vigor, health, and love. Rare is the poet who lives to old age but does not write about it. Similarly, Julia Kasdorf, in her poem 'First Gestures,' alludes to the discovery, early in life, that all things will eventually disappear: 'Among the first we learn is good-bye, your tiny wrist between Dad’s forefinger and thumb forced to wave bye-bye to Mom.' 'Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies,' writes Donald Hall in his poem 'Affirmation.' The it he refers to is, of course, age, and its attendant sense of mortality.

Poems about growing up