The Time of Age
Seventeenth-century poet and statesman Edmund Waller reflects on the benefits of advancing years.
about 1687
Seventeenth-century poet and statesman Edmund Waller reflects on the benefits of advancing years.
about 1687
A great deal is made today of the advantages of youth in benefiting society. Edmund Waller, a poet who sat in the Commons for over fifty years, was no less impressed by the advantages of old age — which not only renew our usefulness for this world, but also ready us for a better one.
THE seas are quiet when the winds give o’er;
So calm are we when passions* are no more.
For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost.
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries.
The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d,
Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made:
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new.
* A passion, according to Dr Johnson’s famous dictionary, is “a violent commotion of the mind”. He also quotes Isaac Watts: “The word passion signifies the receiving any action, in a large philosophical sense; in a more limited philosophical sense, it signifies any of the affections of human nature, as love, fear, joy, sorrow: but the common people confine it only to anger.”
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.