Growing Old Matthew Arnold

Is it to lose the glory of the form,

Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?

Not our bloom only, but our strength -decay?

Grow stiffer, every function less exact,

Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!

Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,

As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,

And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,

And not once feel that we were ever young.

In the hot prison of the present, month

And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:

Festers the dull remembrance of a change,

When we are frozen up within, and quite

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost

I. In Matthew Arnold's Growing Old, we begin with a question from the speaker: "What is it to grow old?" In the subsequent seven stanzas, the speaker will attempt to answer this question for us. In the first two stanzas, he describes a

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med the living man. IV. The speaker's tone is subtly altered in these last three stanzas. This is because, in the first four stanzas the speaker covers the physical ailments of growing old (one and two), and the perceived illusions of old age by the young (three and four). The speaker's tone is serious and factual. He is also clear about exactly what he means to tell us. In other words, we know he is talking about the deterioration of the physical in stanzas one and two and the perceived benefits of old age by the young in stanzas three and four. Yes, he tells us, these things do represent growing old, factual or not. We clearly know he is talking about physically growing old, the aging process. However, in the last three stanzas of the poem I think we uncover the poet's real purpose in constructing his poem in this manner. For in the last three stanzas the poet has his speaker tell us, exactly, what growing old is. However, in doing so, the speaker remains vague on a very significant level. The speaker is not clear that he is talking only about physically growing old. On another level, it seems to be his purpose to tell us that while one cannot escape the physical condition of growing old, one can avoid allowing on

Category: Literature - G