Poems Rethabile Likes

When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats | Poems Rethabile Likes "When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats Actor Cillian Murphy reads "When You Are Old" by W.B. Yeats — a tender, timeless poem of enduring love. Find his books W.B. Yeats's "When You Are Old" is one of the most tender and enduring love poems in the English language. Written for Maud Gonne, the woman he loved and proposed to multiple times — and was rejected by — the poem imagines a future in which she looks back on her life and recognizes the one man who loved not just her beauty but her "pilgrim soul." This recording, by the Irish actor Cillian Murphy , captures the quiet ache and dignity of Yeats's lines. Murphy's voice — soft, measured, with the weight of deep feeling — brings the poem to l...

Affirmation by Donald Hall | Poems Rethabile Likes Affirmation by Donald Hall To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand. If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful. New women come and go. All go. The pretty lover who announces...

The Wild Swans of Coole by W. B. Yeats | Poems Rethabile Likes The Wild Swans at Coole by W. B. Yeats The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine and fifty swans. The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count; I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings. I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. All's changed s...

An Old Man's Winter Night by Robert Frost | Poems Rethabile Likes An Old Man's Winter Night by Robert Frost All out of doors looked darkly in at him Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, That gathers on the pane in empty rooms. What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. What kept him from remembering what it was That brought him to that creaking room was age. He stood with barrels round him—at a loss. And having scared the cellar under him In clomping there, he scared it once again In clomping off;—and scared the outer night, Which has its sounds, famil...