composition analysis

Poetry Analysis – Final Draft 

By the due date assigned, submit your revised analytical essay on poetry as a Microsoft Word document.

Consider the feedback you received on the Week 1 rough draft from your instructor, peers, and Smarthinking (if your paper was submitted for review), and determine what changes you want to make. Consider:

• Do you need a more engaging opener or a stronger thesis?
• Do you need to reinforce your arguments and add more supporting evidence?
• Do you have areas to develop or clarify?
• Are you satisfied with your conclusion?

Once you have revised the essay, review it for editing issues. Run the spell checker and grammar checker in Word, and then proofread, looking for typos the checkers might have missed. Read it aloud to listen for awkward places and to fine tune the flow. Make sure you have applied APA rules of style to source citations as well as the overall formatting of your essay. 

Daysi Fernandez

Daysi Fernandez posted Jan 20, 2018 6:33 PM

When You are Old

The speaker in William Butler Yeats’ poem, When You are Old, takes a moment to speak to his beloved to tell her that she ought to read a particular book, the very same one where this poem is recorded, when she becomes aged so that she can remember her youth. As the speaker’s beloved reads this book, she will recall all the people who had loved her grace and beauty in the past, whether it was with real or fake sentiments. She will also recall that of all these, there was one person who loved her unreservedly even as she grew old and her looks changed. As the lady thinks back on the memory of this man, she will regret that she missed out on an opportunity of true love for this love did not last. This poem utilizes the themes of love, loss, and regret to communicate the sentiment felt by almost all rejected lovers.

As the poem opens in the first stanza, we are introduced to our speaker speaking directly to a former lover of his. This lover is relatively young as the speaker tells the lady that “When you are old and grey…” implying that she has not aged as yet – there may be time left to reconsider her love choices, one surmises. The choice of words he uses next such as “nodding by the fire” helps us picture an old woman who is so old she can barely stay awake. And “old, and gray” evoke the image of the same woman, this time with hair, eyes, and skin that have lost their color and become dull. At the point that she will be reading this book, she will be weary and likely close to death, and thus the book will remind her of the “soft look” and the “shadows” that her eyes once had. She will recall how her beauty or grace may have aroused in her lovers true or false feelings of love at a time when she had not experienced the rigors or the ravages of time.

As the speaker addresses his muse’s beauty, he remarks that some of those who loved her only valued her beauty, but there was one, himself perhaps, who “loved the pilgrim soul in you.” By pilgrim soul, the speaker could imply that his former beloved was a restless person, though it is likely that he means to say that he loved her very deeply. This is evidenced by the fact that he goes on to say that he even “… loved the sorrows of your changing face” which implies that even as her beauty started to fade, he still loved her. It is in this expression that we see the theme of the fleeting nature of life and love expressed as the superficial love of those who flocked to the beloved is contrasted with that which is deeper and more spiritual.

In the last stanza, the man goes back to the frame of time when his beloved will be old. She is depicted as “bending down beside the glowing bars” and murmuring softly and sadly to herself that “…love fled and paced upon the mountains and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” The muse has withdrawn into a sad life where she has rejected true love and must now live in regret for making that choice. The speaker does manage to confess his unconditional love for her, all the same, when he states that he loved her for the pilgrim soul that she had and not merely because of her appearance. It is no surprise, then, that he compares his love for her to the heavens in the last stanza, and this indicates that he is still purely devoted to her.

The poem’s tone changes in the last stanza where we see regret expressed where in the first two we had a romantic and positive tone going. In conclusion, Yeats indicates in his poem that he loved a woman but was rejected. Even so, he goes on to tell her that she will, in the future, regret not marrying him. This poem resonates with all kinds of people, young or old, as the can relate to what the poet speaks on. For the young, they can stop and think on how they might look like or be when they age, while the old can ponder about how they lived the days of their youth. As such, this poem succeeds in revealing to us the realities of passing time, how short life is, and the importance of love.

This is what the professor wants me to do !!!!!!!!

Hi, Daysi. In this essay, you discussed your selection from the poems this week. This week your goal was to identify the “theme” of the poem and then to provide some support from the point that helps to explain your main points. You have a good rough draft. You can now go back to review where you can add in more details and analysis to build your case. Develop each paragraph in the essay and provide a full explanation of your ideas.

Thank you for the work you put into this essay. Remember, the grade you earn on the rough draft may not be the grade on the final. You will need to work on a good revision of your essay. You can review my comments in the thread where you posted your essay.

The second part of the assignment was for you to provide 2 peer reviews for your classmate. You did not provide the peer reviews for your classmates. This is an integral part of the writing process and will allow you to build your own skills as a writer and editor.