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 all of the things growing old represents, including loss of form, lustre, strength and function. However, he asks if all of these things are what growing old signifies. His answer in stanza three is, “Yes, this, and more!” However, the speaker then tells us in the next two stanzas what growing old is not. It is not “what in youth we dreamed ‘twould be!”
Once he has categorized the list of youthful misperceptions about what growing old is not, the speaker continues in the next three stanzas to tell us the realities of exactly what growing old is. We find, growing old from this perspective is akin to being trapped in a decaying prison of flesh and debilitation, a condition where the individual is “frozen up within”, a “phantom” of the youthful self, one that is able only “To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost / Which blamed the living man.”
II. We get very little indication about who the speaker of this poem may be. We do get one gender reference in the final line which would make it appear that the speaker is male, “the living m...