Old Age and Ageing

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs.

I grow old … I grow old …

Here I am, an old man in a dry month

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.

‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man said,

My hair is grey, but not with years,

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms Inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name.

How confusing the beams from memory’s lamp are; One day a bachelor, the next a grampa. What is the secret of the trick? How did I get so old so quick?

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

I grow old… I grow old…. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.

As a white candle In a holy place, So is the beauty Of an aged face.

Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather.

An old man’s eagle mind.

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

What shall I do with this absurdity— O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail?

That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress.

What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?

Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book. 3

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume.