Growing old
Listen to and read the poem “Growing Old” by Matthew Arnold. The poem was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820.
Matthew Arnold was born on 24 December 1822 in Laleham, England, and he died on 15 April 1888 in Liverpool, England, at the age of 65.A poet, critic, and school inspector, Matthew Arnold is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet, along with Tennyson and Browning. Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.
External links:
What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The luster of the eye? Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? — Yes, but not this alone.
Is it to feel our strength — Not our bloom only, but our strength — decay? Is it to feel each limb Grow stiffer, every function less exact, Each nerve 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 with sunset glow, A golden day’s decline.
’Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are no more.
It is to spend long days And not once feel that we were ever young; It is to add, immured In the hot prison of the present, month To month with weary pain.
It is to suffer this, And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel. Deep in our hidden heart Festers the dull remembrance of a change, But no emotion — none.
It is — last stage of all — When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.