Poems

a type of literature based on the interplay of words and rhythm. It often employs rhyme and meter.

• In poetry, words are strung together to form sounds, images, and ideas that might be too complex or abstract to describe directly.

When You Are Old~William Butler Yeats

• It was first published in 1893 and is one of the famous love poems. It comprises the poet’s eternal love for his beloved. However, its popularity lies in the description of the poet’s meditation on catastrophic onslaught of time.

Major Themes

• Love

• Rejection

• Time

Literary Devices in “When You Are Old”

• Imagery is used to make readers perceive things with their five senses.

•  is using symbols to signify ideas and qualities, giving them symbolic meanings different from literal meanings.

• Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same lin

• Alliteration is a repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of the letters in the same line.

• Personification is to give human characteristics to inanimate objects

• Enjambment: It is defined as a thought in a verse that does not come to an end at a line break;

Poetic Devices in “When You Are Old”

• A stanza is a poetic form of some lines. There are three stanzas in this poem with each comprising of four lines.

•  A quatrain is a four-lined stanza borrowed from Persian poetry. Here, each stanza is quatrain as the first one and the second one.

• Rhyme Scheme: The poem follows the ABBA rhyme scheme in all the stanzas.

• End Rhyme is used to make the poem melodious. The poet has used end rhyme in this poem such as in the first stanza the rhyming words are, “sleep”, “deep”, “book”, “look.”