The song of old mother
This poem by William Butler Yeats is about an old woman who has to work all day, every day because she is old.
The old mother has to wake up in the morning and ‘kneel and blow’ to light the fire after which she must wash, bake, and sweep until night time, and while the old mother is working into the night, the young are already asleep in their bed dreaming of unproductive things, after doing nothing in the day.
The poem seems to be saying that the young don’t have to work because they are young and the old have to work because they are old. The fire is mentioned again in the last line, as in the first two lines, which shows that it is an endless cycle.
It is a 10 line poem with no apparent line breaks, but the sense of the poem divides it into two stanzas with 5 lines each. The first stanza about how she must work and what she does, the second about the young and how they do nothing.
Filed under: English Literature
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