By Amanda Rivers
What is on your mind when you are reading the poem When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats? If you happen to be a lady, you must have much deeper feeling towards these lines:
“How many loved your moments of glad grace, and loved your beauty with love false or true, but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face.”
To some degree, I believe the idea that men and women come from different species. Most women are born with the zeal for beauty. Although not many of them will be like the Queen who keeps asking the mirror all the time who is the most beautiful woman in the world, still, the majority of them do dream about being as pretty as the princesses in the fairy tales, who have never failed to win the love of the perfect princes and the endings, which are monotonously alike – living together happily ever after. Every young girl will go through a process of the graduate disillusion, when they get to know that these are merely fairy tales, but not what true life will be like. After going a long long way, girls start to doubt some of their former beliefs, which seemed so solid and true.
Personally, I thought about the question why the fairy tales all stop at the marriages of the hero and the heroine. And then I got my own answer to this and that is, because the authors do not dare to write on. They just let us see how happy they are to be together but do not give a clue to how things will go during all the years to come, living together. The ever rising divorce rate now seems to tell us some truth.
Time is a thing usually held in awe by people, because nearly nothing in this world can withstand the test of time, youth, beauty, life, relationships or feelings. Compared with men, women are more scared of time, because of the sense of insecurity when their beauty gradually fades as time goes by. They may also sense the leaving of the love of the man they have been with for such a long time. While I love Martin Buxbaum’s view on beauty. He said, “Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty — they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.”
I believe wise women do not struggle for the stay of youth, but just wave goodbye to it when it’s time, with peaceful and beautiful smiles on their faces. Maybe the harder you try to drag it back, the faster you will lose other things. It’s useless to get mad at time or yourself or anybody else, while the only thing you can do is take it easy. And what we’ll see is a peaceful and elegant lady who seems to have got the kind of beauty and grace that lasts a lifetime.
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