Lost Love

At first glance, “When You are Old” by William Yeats seems tells a story of a old woman, who lost her chance at love, but after a few more readings, the meaning becomes unclear. This poem has no definite time frame. Is the speaker an omnipresent being warning the subject to not miss out on her chance at love? or is it a third party, who witnessed her failure to recognize her opportunity at hand. One thing that is definitive is that the poem has a sad tone, mainly concerned with loss.
In the first stanza the speaker establishes an old women siting by the fire reminiscing about her lost beauty. Whether this scene is in the present or the future is still unclear, and never established in the poem, The “old and gray” woman is sitting by a fire, reading a book and thinking about the her lost beauty. The “soft look” in her eyes has been replaced with “deep shadows” of old age. I think that these bags are physical bags under her eyes, distorting her beauty, but also emotional bags, which come with growing older. This stanza, which speaks of the loss of beauty, a somewhat trivial loss helps set up the third stanza, which speaks of the paramount loss of love.
The second stanza sets up the true tragedy of the story. Though this woman is beautiful and seems to be coveted by many men,indicated by the speaker asking her just “how may loved your moments of glad grace,” it seems that the men, who fell for her were only interested in her physical beauty, something that she will lose in old age. She could decipher if their love was “false or true.” However, one man saw her “pilgrim soul” and loved her relentlessly; he was aware of the fact that she would grow old, and that she would not retain her beauty in old age, yet he did not care. I think that the woman was so used to the other chauvinistic men, that she assumed this man was just like the rest, and could not see past his exterior.
The third stanza parallels the first in that it focuses on the woman by the fire. This time she is kneeling by the “glowing bars” almost in a gesture of prayer and sadly murmuring to herself how “Love fled.” I think that Love is capitalized because it related directly to the man, who loved her unconditionally, and not the general love the other suiters feigned for her. The last two lines were slightly confusing for me; I feel that they can represent two things. First, the man was ashamed that he was rejected and “hid his face among the stars” or the other suiters, or from the lofty “mountains overhead” and the star imagery, he dies.
Overall the general theme is loss, and the speaker's warning of the effects of lost love, either to the subject or the reader.

Wuthering Heights

I chose to read Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I chose it because I really enjoy 19th century literature, and it has been recommended to me many times. I have completely fallen in love with this novel. I love the dark complex romance that threads through the novel, and its somewhat complex plot for a 19th century novel. I'm going to write my paper on the religious imagery throughout the book, because religion in novels fascinates me, and Wuthering Heights in full of it.