叶芝--当你老了-when-you-are-old.pptVIP

* * * * When you are old…… * In 1889 first meet； 23 years old In 1891 first marriage proposal; close friendship poems, plays; William Butler Yeats Poet, Dramatist Maud Gonne Irish patriot, revolutionary, and actress * I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began…… I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race. Her movements were worthy of her form, and I understood at last why the poet of antiquity, where we would but speak of face and form, sings, loving some lady, that she paces like a goddess. I remember nothing of her speech that day except that she vexed my father by praise of war, for she too was of the Romantic movement and found those uncontrovertible Victorian reasons, that seemed to announce so prosperous a future, a little grey. As I look backward, it seems to me that she brought into my life in those days - for as yet I saw only what lay upon the surface - the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, an overpowering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes. * A tall lanky boy with deep-set eyes behind glasses, over which a lock of dark hair was constantly falling, often stained with paint——dressed in shabby clothes…… * When you are old William Butler Yeats in 1893 * When You Are Old  When you are old and gray 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