Growing Old
Matthew Arnold
1822 to 1888
Track 1
Reconstruct the poem by dragging each line into its correct position. Your goal is to reassemble the original poem as accurately as possible. As you move the lines, you'll see whether your arrangement is correct, helping you explore the poem's flow and meaning. You can also print out the jumbled poem to cut up and reassemble in the classroom. Either way, take your time, enjoy the process, and discover how the poet's words come together to create something truly beautiful.
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Each nerve more loosely strung?
It is to add, immured
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
Is it to feel each limb
The years that are no more.
It is to spend long days,
Ah! 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be.
It is—last stage of all—
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Yes, this, and more; but not,
A golden day's decline.
When we are frozen up within, and quite
But no emotion,—none.
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
Which blamed the living man.
Deep in our hidden heart
The phantom of ourselves,
It is to suffer this,
What is it to grow old?
'Tis not to have our life
—Yes, but not this alone.
Is it to feel our strength—
To month with weary pain.
In the hot prison of the present, month
The lustre of the eye?
And heart profoundly stirred;
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,—
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost,
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
And not once feel that we were ever young;
'Tis not to see the world
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.