![]() ‘Work! work! work! / While the cock is crowing aloof! / And work - work - work, / Till the stars shine through the roof!’Īll day, every day, the woman slaves away at her stitching, yet she remains in ‘poverty, hunger, and dirt’. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.First published in 1843, ‘The Song of the Shirt’ takes its title from the song the woman sings to herself as she works hard at her stitching, making shirts from dawn till – well, beyond dusk. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. For more classic poetry selections, see our pick of the best poems about childhood and youth and these classic poems about death. This short poem offers a thought that is rarer than the usual ones we might expect about old age, and so offers a different take on the process of ageing.įor more classic poetry, we recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse – perhaps the best poetry anthology on the market. Adcock, who is now in her eighties, writes in ‘Mrs Baldwin’ of the envy that grips her at hearing that someone else has received a cancer diagnosis, because somehow – like Tithonus – she longs for death and release now that she is old and worried about losing hold (specifically, she hints at Alzheimer’s). It was published in 2013 in Adcock’s collection Glass Wings. This is the most recent poem on this list of poems about ageing. She died in 2018, but had refused to wear purple in her declining years, saying the colour didn’t suit her … ) By then, the poem was already 35 years old, and Joseph – a youthful 29 when she penned the poem – was already approaching those twilight years of old age which she looked towards in ‘Warning’. ![]() (The full results of the poll were published as The Nation’s Favourite Poems. In 1996, ‘Warning’ was voted the British nation’s 22 nd favourite poem of all time, in a BBC poll. This comic poem, which has been voted the UK’s favourite post-war poem on several occasions, celebrates approaching old age and the freedoms which one’s twilight years can bring, when we can wear what we like and indulge our eccentricities which, while we were being ‘grown-up’, had to repress. Prompted by a visit to his old college at Oxford and the discovery that one of his former student peers now has a grown-up son while Larkin remains childless, ‘Dockery and Son’ explores the passing of youth, the way people use their time, and how old age and then ‘the only end of age’ awaits us all. The poem is an interesting example of a female poet taking on a male character’s persona and re-examining it: the Crusoe we encounter is altogether more ‘modern’ and introspective than the depiction in Defoe’s novel over two centuries before. ![]() What does Defoe’s character have left, after his life of adventure and toil? This dramatic monologue imagines Robinson Crusoe looking back on his life, after he’s been rescued from his island and has returned to England as an older man. Since ‘Byzantium’ (the Turkish city that later became known as Constantinople, and, later still, Istanbul) was variously ruled by Greeks, Romans, and Christians (in the later years of the Roman empire), and is now largely populated by Muslims, the city acts as a sort of meeting-point for various ethnicities, cultures, religions, and traditions, its significance in Yeats’s poem can be interpreted in light of this idea of shared ideas across different religious systems.ħ. The poem is about renouncing the hold of the world upon us, and attaining something higher than the physical or sensual. This is what ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is about. These are, perhaps, inevitable thoughts once we reach a certain age, and they certainly came to Yeats in his later years, and he frequently wrote about growing old. Growing older, feeling out of touch with the new generation superseding you, feeling surplus to requirements, waiting for death. So begins this, one of the most famous poems Yeats wrote, and one of his later poems, written when he himself was growing old. The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,įish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long In one another’s arms, birds in the trees, ![]() The heart that beats in his aged chest is that of a young man still capable of feeling love, romantic longing, and infatuation. The implication, of course, is that the speaker’s romantic leanings are those of a young man, even though the speaker himself is now old. A short poem, with a simple message: the speaker looks at himself in his mirror (or ‘glass’) and sees his wrinkled and ageing skin, and wishes that his heart was similarly weakened and reduced.
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