Poem about love in youth and old age

[ThisYearsGirl]

For this really lame intro-level poetry class, I have to write a 10 page paper comparing at least four poems that deal with simliar themes. I have some pretty clever ideas about “Bresson’s Movies” by Robert Creeley http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A37962-2001Sep27
and Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~stevel/literature/hardy.html .

You guys are a literate bunch. Do you know any other poems dealing with this kind of “image of young love, then image of love in older age” poems?

[Helen_s_Eidolon]

Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare (kinda):

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev’n to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Don’t know if that’s helpful, but my goodness I love that poem.

[snermy]

There’s always Robert Browning’s Rabbi ben Ezra
Elizabeth Barrett Browning also probably wrote several to add to your topic.

For some reason the linked poems made me think of Frances Cornford’s All Souls’ Night, which I can’t seem to find online tonight…

My love came back to me
Under the November tree
Shelterless and dim.
He put his hand upon my shoulder,
He did not think me strange or older,
Nor I him.

I’d suggest going through some of the anthologies on Bartleby. I run across stuff I never heard of there all the time.

[king_of_spain]

The one that comes to mind for me is “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats - go here and scroll down a bit. I love me some Yeats…

[istara]

HELP! You have made me remember a Villanelle we studied in school years ago. It was by a woman, and it was the cleverest exploitation of the structure imaginable. It was by a female poet, and she altered the meanings of the repeated line with punctuation.

I vaguely remember near the end there was something about green leave on a tree.

But like the OP, it was about young love that had grown old gracefully.

Can’t find it anywhere. Anyone?