When you are old

'And slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep'

Assonance, slows down the pace of poem, there is a somnolence to these lines

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; Volta

Borrowing a convention from the sonnet form, line 7 marks the poem's "turn"—that is, the point at which the poem's argument shifts and the speaker's intentions so far are made clearer. The important word here is the conjunction, "But." It indicates a dividing line between the two kinds of love the speaker describes. Essentially, the poem seeks to demonstrate that the speaker's love for the addressee is singular—it's like no other love that the addressee has experience

' and loved your beauty with love false or true'

Love based on physical appearance

Personification ....how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Love is personified. Love flees and hides like a human does. This helps the speaker to convey that the addressee will not be able to have the true Love when she yearns for it.

'One man loved the pilgrim soul in you And loved the sorrows of your changing face'

Loves her for the depth of her character rather than her beauty

DIACOPE Diacope is used in the second stanza, in which each line contains the word "loved."

One of the poem's aims is to draw a distinction between the love that the speaker feels for the addressee and the ways in which the addressee is loved by others—ways that the speaker implies are inferior.

'Bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled'

Poet predicts a sad, lonely scene

' Paced upon the mountains overhead/and hid his face amid a crowd of stars

Sad poignant metaphor

The repeated use of "and"—which is developed into more extensive polysyndeton later in the poem—has a similar lulling effect.

The "and" between "old" and "grey" is grammatically unnecessary, but its presence makes the line take just a little bit longer, slowing the poem down to a pace befitting a vision of sleepy old age.

Assonance hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

The assonance between "hid," "his," and "amid"—all using a quick /i/ sound—also contributes to this quickening of the poem's pace and subtly highlights the idea that "Love" has vanished too quickly and effectively for the addressee to ever regain it.

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; Use of diacope

The diacope of the repeated "loved" turns the stanza into a process of categorization. Line 7's "loved" is the third, and it states the nature of the speaker's love for the addressee. Alternatively, this could be the speaker describing the love of a third person for the addressee, a "man" who isn't the speaker. This latter interpretation seems unlikely. Literary critics generally agree that Yeats wrote this poem for the Irish nationalist and actress Maud Gonne, a close friend of his with whom he was infatuated.

Enjambment (run-on line) 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.

The enjambment in these lines helps bring this restless quality to life. The first two stanzas had a slowness to them, in part enabled by caesurae and gentle consonance, but the enjambment in the last three lines creates an opposite effect. "Love" flees, and the enjambment of lines 10, 11 and 12 makes the poem accelerate appropriately, as if the poem itself is now rushing to get away.

The symbolic stars

The stars are a symbol of eternity, and in this sense love seems now to be eternally hidden from the addressee. This suggestion of eternity could also have something in common with the "book" of line 2. it's possible that the speaker is predicting the poem will outlive the addressee.

Love is capitalised

This capitalization could also relate to the more general idea of the addressee's one true love—that is, the chance at which the addressee failed to take. Love flees, suggesting fright and/or danger, heading for the mountains. Here, he paces and hides among the stars. The pacing suggests restlessness—perhaps "Love", whether it's the man of line 7 or a more general idea of love, laments the love that never was.

Line 5 uses alliteration—"many" and "moments"; "glad grace"—to

bring the description of the addressee to life.

The first line subtly evokes the weariness of old age "When you are old and grey and full of sleep" The hypnotic repetition of consonant /l/

old, full and sleep has a lulling effect adding to the image of of the addressee drifting in and out of sleep by the fire in her old age.