Ten or twelve years ago I wrote an introduction to a volume of Hardy's poems in which I considered the consequences for the poetry of the fact that most of it was written in the last decades of a long life. I want to return to that subject here, but in a different way, expanding it to include another great modern poet, and shifting it upward to the level of theory: The Theory of Old Poets. That's how our thinking about art works, isn't it? We have an idea; time passes; the idea grows, spreads, changes, until particulars begin to look like principles; and we have a theory. I'm a decade and more older than I was when I first wrote about Hardy and old age. And so, I might add, are you. A decade nearer our own old age: high time we thought about it.

When in my theorizing I use the term Old Poets—with those capital letters—I mean, obviously, poets who lived a long time. But not all poets who live past middle age become Old Poets. Some fall silent at the end, as Eliot and Larkin did. Some go on in their poems being their younger selves: Robert Graves, for example. Graves was ninety when he died, and was still writing poems in his eighties; but his bargain with the White Goddess seems to have been that she would continue to inspire him on the condition that he continued to write the kind of poems he had always written. Some poets abandon poetry altogether for another medium: like Kingsley Amis, who turned to fiction—I suppose because it was a better form in which to be bilious about the world.

But most poets go on being poets, and in time become old poets (note the lower case here), just as old painters, old gardeners, old carpenters, old literary critics go on practicing their crafts long past the age at which you might think they should retire. The reason is obvious: it's what they do, what they have always done; it fills their days; and, more than that, it defines them to themselves. To the question Who am I? our work provides us with an immediate and irrefutable answer.

Longevity isn't the sole defining condition of being an Old Poet: as I conceive the category, Old Poets are those who in their old age make poetry out of that state—make age not simply their subject, but the condition of consciousness in their poems, and so make the perceived world of age real to other minds.

Let me describe that world, as I find it in the work of Old Poets. It is a world of less, fewer, and last: there is less activity there than in our world, and less possibility of action; in the grammar of that world words like act and love are past-tense verbs. Things happen there for the last time, and that affects the poetic tone; for, as Dr. Johnson said, “No man does anything consciously for the last time, without a feeling of sadness.” (Eleven poems in Hardy's Collected Poems begin with the word last.)

So old age is a tone. It also has a spatial dimension. Age is a reduced space—the horizons closed in, the interiors confining and disfurnished, like an old unoccupied house. Age is a place in which the present is less present than it is in the world of ordinary being; there are fewer people there, fewer friends. But, if it is unpopulated by the living, it is crowded with the dead: age is ghost-haunted.

If space is different in the world of old age, so is time. Time there stretches backward like a long road taken, into the distant past; forward it has almost no length at all, only a little span, like a short corridor, with a closed door at the end.

This world of age is difficult to talk about. We mustn't be too easily sad or sentimental about what is, after all, only ordinary human reality; and we mustn't let ourselves become mortality-bores. The best of the Old Poets avoid those traps: they are neither sentimental nor boring; they simply confront the world time has given them, and compel it to be poetry.

It's an exclusive world, this poetic world of old age. Younger poets may visit it, through the poems of their elders; but they can't practice there. There is no place in Old Poet Theory for poems by younger poets in which they imagine age: “Here am I, an old man in a dry month” won't do; nor “Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be”; nor “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Those poems have permanent places in our English-language canon, but they don't tell us what age is like. They can't. For age clearly is one of those human experiences—like love, sex, war, and religion—that, before you've had them, aren't anything like what you imagine they will be. (Auden said fame is like that, too.)

When I think about old age as a separate and distinct human condition I think of the Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It. Jaques's Seventh Age is grim:

                                                                                                                                  last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

You must recognize, as I do, that those lines don't accurately describe old Hardy, or old Yeats, or any other Old Poet. And yet … I am caught by Shakespeare's sense of age as diminishment and loss—sans, sans, sans, what Hardy called time's “takings away”—and of oblivion. And so, even though it isn't quite fair, I think of this poetry as Seventh Age poetry: poetry that is about the reality of loss-in-time, and how to live with it, and make poetry out of it.

In this sense Hardy and Yeats are Seventh Age poets. But not in the same way. Indeed I think they can be seen as two distinct subtypes, which we might identify with Shakespeare's two greatest old men: Prospero and Lear. Pause for a moment to think of those two figures of Age. Prospero, in the last act of The Tempest: calm, accepting, beyond action, having resigned his place in the public world of power to return to Milan and think about death. An old man who has accepted diminishment and has given it dignity: Hardy at Max Gate, voluntarily withdrawn from the literary marketplace of London, retired from the novel-writing that had made him famous, living the diminished life of age, and writing the poetry of that condition; the old poet as sage, the truth-teller, no longer an agent in his life, but an observer.

Then think of Lear: Lear on the heath, passionate and raging, without court or courtiers, without comforts, exposing himself to suffering—an old man who would rather be a mad diminished king than no king at all—tragic, and consciously so, playing the role of Old Man as Tragic Hero. Yeats in his late years, not withdrawn, still in the world but raging against it, a passionate public man, the old poetic self remade once more as Seventh Age Hero, the old man who remains an agent in his life by an act of will.

So: two Old Poets, both role-playing, but playing different roles, which yet have this in common—that they make Old Poetry possible.

Just when the Seventh Age begins in a poet's life is unpredictable. No door slams on the earlier life, not at three-score-and-ten or any other age. But in individual cases one can usually locate the point of change quite precisely in the poetry, and if one knows the life one can conjecture reasons. It happened in Hardy's poetic career between the publication of Time's Laughingstocks in 1909 and Satires of Circumstance in 1914—between his seventieth and seventy-fifth year. The cause is perfectly clear: it was of course the death of Emma Hardy in 1912. It was Hardy's greatest loss, his greatest personal diminishment: Emma's death emptied his life of his strongest link with his own past, with youth, hope, and happiness, and shifted her presence and all that she meant to him into the ghost-world of memory.

There is another thing to be said about the effect of Emma's death. She was Hardy's exact contemporary; and when someone our own age dies, we feel a tremor in our life: our own death takes on a felt certainty then that is quite different from the untroubling proposition that all men are mortal. That's why old people read obituary pages, starting with the death-dates; they hope they'll find that the dead are all older than they are, and that death can therefore be postponed into the uncertain future, and thought about another day. The death of an exact contemporary has a different message: it says death is here, in the present.

You can see this change to Seventh Age poetry in the “Poems of 1912-13” that Hardy wrote immediately after his wife's death, most explicitly in the first poem, “The Going”:

                              Well, well! All's past amend,
                              Unchangeable. It must go.
I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon. … O you could not know
                              That such swift fleeing
                              No soul foreseeing—
Not even I—would undo me so!

But it is everywhere in his later poems, in poems about his coffin, his grave, his ghost—a curious line of posthumous poems by a living Old Poet.

For Yeats the point of change occurred somewhere in the 1920s, between Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and The Tower (1928)—earlier in his life than in Hardy's. (In 1921 Yeats was only fifty-six.) The cause seems of a different kind: the Troubles, the Irish Civil War, and the settlement that was a defeat for his dreams of a romantic Ireland made him an Old (and a bitter) Poet before his time. The great poems that came out of those last years, the final two decades of his life, are full of age and loss.

Two great poets become Old Poets, then, for different reasons that reflect their different relationships to the world. Hardy, the private man, suffers a private loss that leaves him memory-haunted; Yeats, the public man, suffers a public loss that leaves him haunted by his country's history, and by the impotence of poetry in the public world. In both cases the book that follows the loss is the poet's greatest single volume. What shall we make of that? That, for a poet, loss is gain? That great art may come out of the diminishments of the Seventh Age of Man? The history of western culture offers us considerable evidence that this may be true: old Michelangelo, deaf Beethoven, aging Degas (who only became Degas, Renoir said, as his health and sight began to fail), and Renoir himself, old and crippled, a brush strapped to his arthritic hand, still painting Renoirs.

When Seventh Age poets speak in their own voices, they often do so in images of their diminishment. Here is a stanza from Hardy's most poignant poem of age, “An Ancient to Ancients”:

Where once we danced, where once we sang,
          Gentlemen,
The floors are sunken, cobwebs hang,
And cracks creep; worms have fed upon
The doors. Yea, sprightlier times were then
Than now, with harps and tabrets gone,
          Gentlemen!

And here is the first stanza of Yeats's poem of age, “An Acre of Grass”:

Picture and book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.

You see the similarities: two passages of confinement, decay and loss, two imaged spaces emptied of human company—and of human energy, too, for Old Age's reality also has its kinetic aspect as life runs down at the end.

And yet in these poems there are presences, not living but imagined, a company of the Old to be invoked against age. Hardy calls up classical authors who wrote into their old age: Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, Homer, Augustin, Origen. And Yeats names old artists and their old creations, as images of how the mind's energy can defy age: Shakespeare's Timon and Lear, William Blake, Michael Angelo. By naming these aged heroes, Old Hardy and Old Yeats claim places in their company.

But not in the same way, not in the same tone. I have suggested that Hardy and Yeats are two distinct types of Old Poet—one Prospero, the other Lear. Hardy, Prospero-like, ends his poem in a calm diminuendo, addressed to the young generation that will succeed him:

And ye, red-lipped and smooth-browed; list,
                              Gentlemen;
Much is there waits you we have missed;
Much lore we leave you worth the knowing,
Much, much has lain outside our ken:
Nay, rush not: time serves: we are going,
                              Gentlemen.

A curious, energyless ending, like the soft speech of an old man short of breath, uttering one line at a time, and finally one phrase at a time:

Much is there waits you we have missed; (breath)
Much lore we leave you worth the knowing, (breath)
Much, much has lain outside our ken: (breath)
Nay, (breath) rush not: (breath) time serves: (breath)
          we are going, (breath)
                    Gentlemen. (long breath)

Yeats is very different; he roars into his last stanza on a crescendo that only settles into calm at the end—one clause, without a single mark of punctuation to locate a pause in it—one continuous burst of energy, one breath. And then comes the final stanza, first continuing the crescendo. Another continuous burst; and look at the verbs: beat, pierce, shake—what a violent old man this is, alone in his acre of grass!

But the poem doesn't end there, with the dead shaking in their shrouds: it has its own two-line closing diminuendo, its own vision of diminishment: “Forgotten else by mankind, / An old man's eagle mind.” Forgotten: as a poet, that is: a condition to fear and resist, if you're Yeats, because poet was for him an essential, self-defining term.

Do you remember his little poem “To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee”? In it Yeats refers to himself as “the poet William Yeats,” and prays that the characters of the inscription he has had carved on a stone at his tower-home in the West of Ireland will survive when all is ruin again. Those characters do remain on the tower, and a visitor can see them there. But characters means more in the poem than the carved words on that stone: it means the characters of the poem we are reading, and of all Yeats's other poems. Yeats isn't saying that they will certainly remain: what is certain is that, in the cycle of changing things, ruin will return. Those last lines are more a prayer than an affirmation of the permanence of poetry: may they remain; may the words of a poet defeat forgetfulness.

Hardy is different—in many ways. First, in the absence from his poems of himself as a poet. You can't imagine him writing: “I, the poet Thomas Hardy,” because that isn't the role he plays in his poems. He isn't the artist, or the self-created hero: he doesn't remake himself to play the poet's role on the world's stage. He is simply what he is, an old man who used to notice things, a country walker, a rememberer. It is extraordinary how completely Hardy controls the scale of himself in his world, keeping it all small, human-scaled, unpoetic.

Another difference concerns forgottenness. Yeats feared it; Hardy didn't. To be forgotten is a natural and inevitable fate in Hardy's world: the past fades, memory grows dim, the dead survive for a time in the minds of the living, and then cease to exist even there. You all know many poems on that general theme: “His Immortality,” “The To-be-Forgotten,” “The Ghost of the Past,” “Ah, Are You Digging?” Annihilation is a principle that Hardy accepted calmly and without resistance: everything changes, dies, falls; nothing that exists is exempt from Time—not a man, not a star. Hardyans will catch my reference there: It is to “Waiting Both,” a poem from Human Shows, published when Hardy was eighty-five:

A star looks down at me,
And says: “Here I and you
Stand, each in our degree:
What do you mean to do,—
                    Mean to do?”
I say: “For all I know,
Wait, and let Time go by,
Till my change come.”—“Just so,”
The star says; “So mean I:—
                    So mean I.”

It's a poem of complete, motionless passivity: man stands on the earth, star stands in the sky. Both wait. There is nothing else to do.

Yeats was no less aware of the power of Time and Change than Hardy was, but he played the theme differently. In his old poems the will to create confronts the inevitable destruction of Time in a tragic opposition. Yeats celebrates that confrontation: don't stand, he says; don't wait: act; resist Time. You'll lose, but it is mankind's glory to oppose destruction with creation. The late poems are full of statements of that theme: “Lapis Lazuli,” for example, and the last stanza of “Two Songs from a Play”:

Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love's pleasure drives his love away,
The painter's brush consumes his dreams;
The herald's cry, the soldier's tread
Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has fed.

Such energetic images of defeat, such strenuous verbs: drives, consumes, flames. The end is the same as in Hardy: everything passes, nothing escapes the force of Time. But the energy in Yeats makes a difference. That energy drives all those Yeatsian heroes in “An Acre of Grass”—Timon and Lear and William Blake and Michael Angelo. I find no such energy in Hardy's Ancients. They are quiet, past-tense heroes; they “Burnt brightlier towards their setting-day,” Hardy says; but that day came. There is no resistance there, no energy extravagantly spent in the war against Time: they are simply dead old thinkers, fixed and motionless, like portraits on a wall.

Old age is a time of necessary loss. It's also an embarrassment: anyone past middle age knows that; Hardy knew it, and so did Yeats. “I look into my glass, / And view my wasting skin”—that's Hardy; “What shall I do with this absurdity— / O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, / Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog's tail?”—that's Yeats. If we look further into these two poems we will see that they express more than the decay of the flesh; they also reveal the separation between the outer and the inner self that all old people feel. Listen again to Hardy:

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”
For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

This is the last poem in Wessex Poems: Hardy at about sixty. Wasting skin, fragile frame: the exterior is old. But inside is a heart that has not shrunk, but throbs as it did in the noontide of youth. That's the problem.

Now consider Yeats, at about the same age:

What shall I do with this absurdity—
O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
                                                                                Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible—

Again, on the outside, there is the caricature Age, and inside beats the passionate heart. In both poets appears the same self-contradictory old/young self.

How should an Old Poet deal with dissonant reality of diminished flesh and undiminished heart? Hardy went one way—Prospero's way; Yeats went the other—the way of Lear.

Consider first Yeats/Lear. The Lear way with old age is to defy it, to deny diminishment, to proclaim the old heart's vigor. Be passionate, be furious, be insane if you have to; be physical, be sexual—frankly and grossly so. (Do I need to argue that these terms describe Lear? Surely not. Read the sixth scene of act four, one of Lear's mad scenes: “Adultery? Thou shalt not die: die for adultery? No: the wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight. Let Copulation thrive. …” There's a full and passionate old heart here, undiminished, working at full throttle.)

Old Yeats adopted Lear's way, not in his life (which was seemly enough) but in his old poems. One way he did so was by inventing Learish characters as masks of himself, a gallery of old, half-crazy (or entirely crazy) surrogates: the Wild Old Wicked Man, Crazy Jane, Tom the Lunatic, an unnamed Old Man and Old Woman, a hundred-and-one-year-old lover. Through these masks Yeats could speak passionately, directly, coarsely about age, sex, and physical change; he could utter truths that would not have come properly from the mouth of an Irish senator and winner of a Nobel prize—lines such as “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement.”

Yeats's poems of age are often fiercely sexual, yet in most of them sex is not really the subject; it is, rather, the energy that drives the poems, a way of affirming the undiminished heart and the undiminished imagination, against the evidence of the diminished body. It is a strategy for an Old Poet. Yeats explained that strategy in a little poem called “The Spur.” It's a poem about the themes of lust and rage in his later poems. But the poem isn't really about sexuality or anger: it's about how to be an Old Poet. Cherish the furious passions for their energy, it says; better to lust and rage in your poems than to be silent and forgotten.

And what about Hardy? What is Prospero's way with diminishment? It is the opposite of Lear's: acceptance; forgiveness; resignation; calm. By the end of The Tempest we know that for Prospero sex is a disturbance of youth—of people like Ferdinand and Miranda; that lust belongs to Caliban's world; and that rage is inappropriate to age. Prospero has reached the calm seas beyond those storms. Old Hardy was like that; or so it seems, from his poems. For there the passionate acts and issues of human existence have been transposed from the first-person lyric voice (such as Yeats used in his mask-poems) into sexual dramas from other, imagined lives: mismarriages, adulteries, betrayals, suicides, and other satires of circumstance, sometimes witnessed by the speaker of the poem (“The Harbour Bridge”) sometimes told as local history (“The Mock Wife”), or folk-memory (“A Set of Country Songs”), but always distanced—passionate situations that happened to somebody else. And in the rare poems where the desire is first-person personal, it is in the past tense, remote in time, remembered as one might remember an accident or a sickness that one suffered long ago. I'm thinking here specifically of such poems as “Louie” and “Thoughts of Phena,” but the distancing of the erotic is also true of the “Poems of 1912-13.” Look at those poems again: love is present, and very movingly so; but desire is far back, in Cornwall, when Hardy and Emma were young. Sex is only history, in the now of those poems.

You can see the difference in present-tense sexuality between Hardy and Yeats in two small poems in which the poets regard young women. Do you remember Yeats's “Politics”? It comes near the end of his posthumous book of poetry, Last Poems. In the poem Yeats stands in the midst of a political conversation, but can't fix his attention on it, because there is a young girl present. The poem ends: “But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms!” This is the Irish senator being the decorous old Public Man in public, but privately feeling intense, present-tense desire.

And Hardy? The poem that comes to mind is “The High-School Lawn.” Hardy (so often the old voyeur in his poems) peeps through a hedge at a whirl of pretty schoolgirls; but what he feels is not desire, but their common mortality:

A bell: they flee:
Silence then:—
So it will be
Some day again
With them,—with me.

To see pretty girls and think of death how old must a man be?

Hardy, I conclude, was an old poet who was content to be entirely old, who was at ease with diminishment, and even at ease with the prospect of approaching death, accepting silence, accepting forgottenness. A philosophical old man—like Prospero; the opposite of Yeats and Lear, and to me a more disturbing model.

I wonder if posterity, or the lack of posterity, had something to do with it. Yeats had a son and a daughter, and prayed for their future in poems; Hardy had none. Perhaps, because Yeats had children, he thought also of other, nongenetic heirs, and named their inheritance in poems, most movingly in the third part of “The Tower,” which begins:

It is time that I wrote my will;
I choose upstanding men
That climb the streams until
The fountain leap, and at dawn
Drop their cast at the side
Of the dripping stone; I declare
They shall inherit my pride,
The pride of people that were
Bound neither to Cause nor to State …

A will is an old man's utterance, a voice that is first heard from the grave. You have to believe in posterity to write one. Yeats's posterity here is what he called “the indomitable Irishry,” his own defiant and opposing people. In them he survives.

There is another sense of inheritance in Yeats. In “Under Ben Bulben,” his last lyric poem in the edition of Collected Poems that I prefer, he speaks to Irish poets who will come after him, as an aged parent might speak to his children:

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.

You can hear the old man's anger building there against the ugly, artless, unremembering modern world—Yeats playing Lear to the end. But you can also hear the pride of continuance, Irish poet to Irish poet.

There's none of that in Hardy: no descendants, no choosing of heirs, no address to poets to come. The end, in his mind and in his work, was terminal and unconditional; and he accepted it with resignation. You hear none of Yeats's anger in Hardy's old poems, and no pride. He said to his wife, Florence, just before his death, that he had done all that he meant to do, but did not know whether it had been worth doing. Was that diminished pride the source of his calm at the end? The feeling, as he put it in a poem, that “Nothing much matters”? Is that why, in the final poem of his Collected Poems, he resolved to say no more? Life and poetry ran down together, it seemed, and ended in silence—without continuance, and without regret.

Two old poets, at the close of life, regard their lives and their work, and think about worth. These are old thoughts, but they are not exclusively poets' thoughts: all old people must look back that way—in reflective self-assessment. Some readers must have noticed that that last point has hovered over this entire essay, that I haven't really been talking about Old Poets—or not only about Old Poets: I've been talking about Old Age. An unargued assumption all the way has been that poems chart life, or compose models of life lived, that poets can embody truth though they cannot know it (as Yeats said at the end). And that the poems of Old Poets (those capital letters again) may embody truths about old age, which we can learn. They say that age is a diminishment; that life empties then, as memory fills; that age is a time of loss (of friends, of powers, of hopes and expectations); and of self-judgment; and that death becomes a presence, like another person in the room. There is not much comfort in those truths; but then we don't desire truth for its comfortableness, do we? We desire truth because that desire makes us human. We must know, and learn to live with what we know.

How to Be an Old Poet, then, means simply How to Be Old. Hardy and Yeats offer two possible ways—one modest, the other flamboyant; one accepting, the other opposing. Hardy put on old age like an old coat, and lived in it; it fitted him. Yeats made old age a set of gaudy theatrical costumes to act in. Two ways, nearly antithetical, of responding to and enduring what is both an unavoidable physiological fact and a state of mind. Is one way preferable to the other? I can see no objective way of answering that question: your own nature will answer it. But, the reader may say, surely I have leaned toward Yeats, and made him the hero of my essay; surely it is better to be a Wild Old Wicked Man than a Dead Man Stood on End. If you think that, it may be because you have been seduced by Yeats's Old Man's romanticism. For Yeats's old poems do have a high romantic style—“High Talk,” he called it—and high romantic heroes, and grand settings and stage properties—the Sistine Chapel, the cathedral of Saint Sophia, the art of the Quattrocento. And great defiant gestures: that, surely, is the way to be old.

Hardy's old poems have none of that: the talk is not high but plain, and there are no heroes and no works of art. Only life (and, occasionally, Life with a capital L), seen clearly through old eyes, as it is, as it has been. And spoken—not sung, not ranted—in a quiet, unclamorous voice. I want to end this essay with the sound of that old voice, as we hear it in an interesting sequence of Hardy's poems: “For Life I Had Never Cared Greatly,” from Moments of Vision; “Epitaph,” from Late Lyrics; and “He Never Expected Much” and “A Placid Man's Epitaph,” both from the posthumous Winter Words. These are all poems of self-assessment that are also assessments of life itself: the old man not so much judging as defining his own existence in the world. Listen to them—both what they say, and the tone they say it in:

                    For Life I had never cared greatly,
                                        As worth a man's while;
                                        Peradventures unsought,
                    Peradventures that finished in nought,
Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately
                                        Unwon by its style.
I never cared for Life: Life cared for me,
And hence I owed it some fidelity.
It now says, “Cease; at length thou has learnt to grind
Sufficient toll for an unwilling mind,
And I dismiss thee. …”

And a stanza in which World addresses Hardy as a child:

“I do not promise overmuch,
          Child; overmuch;
Just neutral-tinted haps and such,”
          You said to minds like mine.
Wise warning for your credit's sake!
Which I for one failed not to take,
And hence could stem such strain and ache
As each year might assign.

And the last of his epitaphs:

As for my life, I've led it
With fair content and credit:
It said: “Take this.” I took it:
Said: “Leave.” And I forsook it.
If I had done without it
None would have cared about it,
Or said: “One has refused it
Who might have meetly used it.”

These are all poems written in the last decade of a very old poet's life: if any poems are Seventh Age poems, these are. Consider what they express: the Old Poet themes of loss, diminishment, and limitation. But not as an experience peculiar to the winding down of age; all existence is neutral-tinted, any action may come to nothing at any time. Yet there is no pain or bitterness in the poems: they share a calm serenity. They are solitary poems—one voice in emptiness, speaking to nobody; and yet three of them take the form of direct address—to Life, to World—as though in extreme old age, when loss has emptied his world, the Old Poet still has company, the company of All Existence, which speaks to him as honestly as he speaks to us. And speaks in imperatives, says Take this. Leave that. Cease.

These poems are as consistent in their untroubled acceptance as Yeats's poems of crazy old people are in their wild defiance. Perhaps, like Yeats's, they are also mask-poems—a face to wear and a voice to speak with, in order that an old poet near his death might go on making poems, as Hardy did to the very end, to his death-bed. A way to face the Seventh Age of life as a poet, and as yourself.

How to be an Old Poet (which, I have admitted, is really How to Be Old). Yeats and Hardy offer distinct responses to that question, but with some common factors. “How to” suggests a set of instructions, like a recipe. It isn't, of course, that simple, but I think I can abstract a few general principles from their cases: 1) Confront reality honestly: look into your glass. 2) Don't turn away either from the past, which is long and full of failures, nor from the future, which will surely be brief. 3) Seek no consolations. To be honest, in old age, is to be unconsoled. There is one more principle, and it is the most important. 4) Preserve the life of the imagination: feed it with memories and inventions; because imagination is life. This turns my proposition of a moment ago around: the answer to How to Be Old is: Be an Old Poet.