When You Old and Grey is a setting of the William Butler Yeats poem, “When You Are Old”. Not a typical love poem, Yeats writes the text as more of a warning against taking love for granted. The speaker warns a young woman to seek only deep, true love. The woman finds true love, but she disregards it for the frivolity of other attractions. At this point in life she still has her looks and many men are attracted to her, so she abandons her true love for fleeting thrills. The speaker tells the woman she will regret her decision her whole life, even to her dying days. Yeats writes, “one man loved the pilgrim soul in you” meaning, one man loved her for who she really was, not just for how she appeared, which she would only come to appreciate once it was too late.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
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;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.