When You Are Old

The poem was addressed to Maud Gonne, the Irish revolutionary and actress whom Yeats repeatedly proposed to and who repeatedly refused him. Written in 1891, the poem imagines Gonne in old age, regretting that she rejected the one man who loved her unconditionally—Yeats's idealized version of himself.

Yeats modeled the poem on Pierre de Ronsard's sonnet 'Quand vous serez bien vieille' ('When You Are Old'), published in 1578. Ronsard's poem similarly asks an aloof woman to imagine herself elderly and regretful, and Yeats openly adapted the structure and conceit to address his own unrequited love for Maud Gonne.

The phrase 'pilgrim soul' refers to the spiritual, questing dimension of the beloved's identity that Yeats claims to have loved alongside her physical beauty. By contrasting this enduring soul with the transient 'glad grace' of youth, Yeats positions himself as someone whose love transcended mere attraction to her appearance.

Maud Gonne never reciprocated Yeats's romantic feelings, despite his multiple proposals over the course of several decades. She remained devoted to Irish nationalism and her own political activities, and Yeats's frustrated devotion to her became one of the central emotional engines of his early and middle-period poetry.