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demmiblue

(36,712 posts)
Mon Feb 27, 2017, 02:51 PM Feb 2017

W.B. Yeats Classic Poem When You Are Old Gets Adapted Into a Beautiful Short Film



W.B. Yeats’ 1891 poem “When You Are Old” is widely considered a commentary on his unrequited lifelong passion for actress, Irish Republican and suffragette Maud Gonne.

Yeats first met Gonne in 1889 (a meeting which Yeats was later to describe in his memoirs as the day ‘the troubling of my life began’) and he remained in love with her for much of his life, proposing marriage at least four times. Gonne became his muse, and he drew on his tortured love for her, albeit unnamed, as the inspiration for many of his works, including most notably the poem, “When You Are Old.”

Freely based on a sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, which first appeared in Le Second Livre Des Sonnets Pour Hélène in 1578, “When You Are Old” enjoins the object of an unreturned love to reflect–in years to come–on a love rejected, to remember one who ‘loved your moments of glad grace’, and who ‘loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.’

Although Yeats’s poetry is often very dense and rich in allusion to mythology, the occult and history, in “When You Are Old” the pain and bittersweet nature of a spurned love is all too apparent.


http://www.openculture.com/2017/02/w-b-yeats-classic-poem-when-you-are-old-gets-adapted-into-a-beautiful-short-film.html
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W.B. Yeats Classic Poem When You Are Old Gets Adapted Into a Beautiful Short Film (Original Post) demmiblue Feb 2017 OP
Thanks for posting Sherman A1 Feb 2017 #1
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