Growing Old
Matthew Arnold
1822 to 1888
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What is it to grow old?
Is it to the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
—Yes, not this alone.
Is it to feel our strength—
our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each 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 sunset-glow,—
A golden day’s decline.
’Tis not to the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the of the past,
The years that are no more.
is to spend long days,
And not once feel we were ever young;
It is to add, immured
the hot prison of the present, month
To month weary pain.
It is to suffer this,
And feel half, and feebly, what we feel.
Deep in our heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But emotion,—none.
It is—last stage of all—
When we frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
hear the world applaud the hollow ghost,
Which blamed living man.