The Coming Of Wisdom With Time - A poem by William Butler Yeats

Poet: William Butler Yeats
Poem: The Coming Of Wisdom With Time
Volume: The Green Helmet and Other Poems
Year: Published/Written in 1910

Comment 2 of 2, added on July 17th, 2006 at 12:27 PM.

Summer, I hope you thanked your teacher for making you analyse poetry! You did a very nice job, and I'm glad that you posted your comments.
Yeats did an interesting thing by using the term "lying" in conjunction with "days of my youth." He was just going through the motions, going back and forth, with every breeze, though, ideology...that came his way, and in the more experienced portion of his life he "withers into the truth."
There seems to be an absence of anger and more of acceptance of the how life is presented. He has the time to wither, to ponder, to find his way to the truth as he is older--but why must it be a withering expereince? One would think it could be liberating. Old habits and beliefs can die away, but must the man--in the process of finding truth?

dallas holsten from United States

Comment 1 of 2, added on November 9th, 2005 at 5:06 PM.

I had to write an analysis for my english class on four poems by four different poets. So I thought that i'd share it with everyone. It's not very good, but here it is:

“The Coming of Wisdom With Time” speaks of a person gaining knowledge as time progresses. Yeats starts the poem off talking about life, and ending it in death. He goes from happiness, to sadness, grief. He draws in a nice glimpse of the cycle of life in which we grow as individuals.
“Though leaves are many, the root is one.” A tree has the ability to live for thousands of years surviving off of its roots. Each tree produces billions of leaves a year. They bloom, and then they wither away.
“Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun” When a person is younger they do what every child does, they think that they are right, and don’t give much of a care in the world. A child’s eyes are set on having fun, not figuring out the sad truth of the world. “Lying days of my youth,” shows that we know that what we believed in when we were younger was untruthful. We were basically lying to ourselves.
You can think of the world as the tree, and the leaves as each of us. The world is always here, but we are only given so much time until we age, then pass. “Now I may wither into the truth,” as the years go on and a person gets older, their knowledge gross along with them. They aren’t seeing this pretend world that they saw when they were younger. They are seeing the world for what it is more likely to be. They are withering into the truth of life.

Summer from United States

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