"Growing Old" by Matthew Arnold - (poem about aging)
"Growing Old" is English poet Matthew Arnold meditation on the experience of aging. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was a poet of great distinction as well as a prominent figure in British education. He served as a school inspector for many year and traveled to other countries at Britain's behest to study their education systems. In "Growing Old" Arnold gives a gripping account of aging where he purposefully distances the poem away from the sentimental ideas of aging as having "life mellowed and softened with sunset glow" or "seeing the world from a prophetic height" and "feeling the fullness of the past". Instead he defines old age in its absences, by what it's not. Please enjoy this terrific recitation of Matthew Arnold's "Growing Old". And for more more poetry videos join the Blank Verse Films email newsletter. It only comes a once a month: https://mailchi.mp/24fb0c198023/blank...
Full text of the poem below
"Growing Old"
by Matthew Arnold
What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The luster of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
—Yes, but not this alone.
Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more loosely strung?
Yes, this, and more; but not
Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be!
’Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow,
A golden day’s decline.
’Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,
The years that are no more.
It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young;
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.
It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.
It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
~~ Credits ~~
Poem recited by Michael Moerman
Cinematography by Nate Brice
Edited Mike Gioia
~~ The Blank Verse ~~
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