When You Are Old Quotes

“Because to him, who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of the dim wisdoms old and deep
That God gives unto man in sleep”
― W.B. Yeats, When You Are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales

“An old man plays the bagpipes
In a gold and silver wood;
Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,
Are dancing in a crowd.”
― W.B. Yeats, When You Are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales

“But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Thread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
― W.B. Yeats, When You Are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales

“The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away.”
― W.B. Yeats, When You Are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales

“I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open.”
― W.B. Yeats, When You Are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales