Poem of the Day: ‘Growing Old’

Even the honors we might receive when old are mockeries of the successes of a youth that no longer exists.

Via Wikimedia Commons
Rembrandt van Rijn, 'Old Man in an Armchair,' detail, 1652. Via Wikimedia Commons

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) was widely read as a poet during his lifetime, but a tumble in appreciation of his work soon followed. His fellow Victorians Tennyson and Browning remained fixtures, but Arnold’s place as a major Victorian poet gradually slipped, until only “Dover Beach,” his sonnet in praise of Shakespeare, and perhaps portions of “The Scholar-Gypsy” remained in in anthologies of poetry. The American literary critic Lionel Trilling’s 1939 study of Arnold was a precursor of a later revaluing of the Victorian not just as the cultural critic to which his reputation had been reduced, but as a poet. In today’s selection, “Growing Old,” written in his forties, Arnold uses alternating lines of three and five feet to spiral ever deeper into awareness of the pains of growing old — till we recognize, in a brutal line, that to age is to “feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.” Even the honors we might receive when old are mockeries of the successes of a youth that no longer exists.

Growing Old
by Matthew Arnold

What is it to grow old? 
Is it to lose the glory of the form, 
The luster of the eye? 
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? 
—Yes, but not this alone. 

Is it to feel our strength — 
Not our bloom only, but our strength — decay? 
Is it to feel each limb 
Grow stiffer, every function less exact, 
Each nerve more loosely strung? 

Yes, this, and more; but not 
Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be! 
’Tis not to have our life 
Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow, 
A golden day’s decline. 

’Tis not to see the world 
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, 
And heart profoundly stirred; 
And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, 
The years that are no more. 

It is to spend long days 
And not once feel that we were ever young; 
It is to add, immured 
In the hot prison of the present, month 
To month with weary pain. 

It is to suffer this, 
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel. 
Deep in our hidden heart 
Festers the dull remembrance of a change, 
But no emotion — none. 

It is — last stage of all — 
When we are frozen up within, and quite 
The phantom of ourselves, 
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost 
Which blamed the living man.

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul. 


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