When You Are Old

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

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 sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

So I like this poem for one, because it's got such cool imagery. For two, because it's the neatest thing to think of the person Yeats was writing this for opening a book and seeing a poem about her... regardless of what happened in the end. And for three, because of the sentence in bold -- the pilgrim soul. What woman can't identify with that?