The Full Text of “Growing Old”
1What is it to grow old?
2Is it to lose the glory of the form,
3The luster of the eye?
4Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
5—Yes, but not this alone.
6Is it to feel our strength—
7Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
8Is it to feel each limb
9Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
10Each nerve more loosely strung?
11Yes, this, and more; but not
12Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be!
13’Tis not to have our life
14Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow,
15A golden day’s decline.
16’Tis not to see the world
17As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
18And heart profoundly stirred;
19And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,
20The years that are no more.
21It is to spend long days
22And not once feel that we were ever young;
23It is to add, immured
24In the hot prison of the present, month
25To month with weary pain.
26It is to suffer this,
27And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.
28Deep in our hidden heart
29Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
30But no emotion—none.
31It is—last stage of all—
32When we are frozen up within, and quite
33The phantom of ourselves,
34To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
35Which blamed the living man.
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“Growing Old” Introduction
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Matthew Arnold's "Growing Old" is a bleak meditation on aging. Written in the 1860s (when the poet was only in his 40s!), it appears in the 1867 collection New Poems. The poem's speaker warns readers that old age is everything they fear it will be and nothing they hope it will be. For example, it takes away our health, strength, and energy, but it doesn't bring any special wisdom or tender nostalgia in return. Instead, the speaker claims, old age numbs our emotions and makes the present so painful that we gradually forget the past. Even the praise we receive from others is insincere: it comes from people who like us better when we're dying than they did when we were fully "living."
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“Growing Old” Summary
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What does aging mean? Does it mean losing our bodies' beauty and our eyes' brightness? Does it mean forfeiting the glory (the metaphorical victory wreath) of our good looks? Yes, but it means more than this, too.
Does aging erode not only the freshness of youth but our strength in general? Does it cause our limbs to stiffen, our bodily functions to deteriorate, and our nerves to fray?
Yes, but it does more than this, too. Aging isn't what we hoped it would be when we were young! It doesn't make our lives easy and mellow, as if we were fading into the sunset. Our declining years aren't golden years.
Aging doesn't mean observing the world as if from a great height, with the wise eyes of a prophet and a heart full of emotion. It doesn't mean nostalgically weeping and missing the years of our youth.
It means going days without feeling as if we had a youth. It means feeling trapped in the present, as if inside a hot jail cell, and suffering pain and fatigue for months on end.
It means feeling all this pain while even our ability to feel is badly weakened. Deep down, rotting in our heart, lies the memory of some significant change, but we don't attach any emotion to it whatsoever.
In the final phase—when we're frozen over inside and feel like ghosts of what we once were—aging means listening to people praise our ghostly selves, even though they criticized us when we felt fully alive.
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“Growing Old” Themes
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Aging, Decline, and Loss
Matthew Arnold's "Growing Old" is just what its title suggests: a reflection on aging. As the poem's speaker grows older, he reports that all the worst stereotypes about aging are true but that all the positive ones are false. For example, aging does take away one's strength, beauty, mobility, etc., but it doesn't bring a "Mellow[]" calm in return. Nor does it bring "prophetic" insight or the comforts of nostalgia. Instead, it brings a cruel combination of physical pain and emotional numbness. The poem offers no reassurance at all, then, but warns aging readers to prepare for a long struggle—for years that will be anything but "golden."
The speaker reports that growing old is a process of prolonged, painful "decline." He confirms that aging weakens the body and eyesight, frays the nerves, stiffens the limbs, and erodes physical beauty. But he repeatedly adds, in effect: wait, there's more! These well-known effects of aging aren't even the worst part of the process.
The speaker then debunks the common idea that age brings contentment and wisdom. He warns that old age is not what "in youth we dreamed 'twould be." In other words, he has no good news to offset the bad; any comforting "dream[s]" about the "golden" years are simply myths. He reports that age doesn't "Mellow[]" the mood or cast a "sunset glow" over one's life. Nor does it offer a "prophetic" vision of the world or "stir[]" the heart with intense nostalgia. Instead, aging numbs the emotions. While the body suffers "weary pain," the "heart" freezes over—to the point where one can no longer remember youth, let alone miss it.
In short, the poem offers a sober warning; it encourages an attitude of stoic realism toward the aging process. Toward the end, the speaker echoes the "All the world's a stage" speech from Shakespeare's As You Like It, which warns that old age destroys teeth, taste, eyesight, and "everything" else in life. Similarly, Arnold's poem cautions readers not to expect any gains in return for all that old age takes away.
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Reputation and Legacy
"Growing Old" mentions only one apparent upside of old age—and even this turns out to be a bitterly ironic drawback. According to the speaker, when we've grown so old that we feel like "hollow ghost[s]" of our former selves, people around us start to praise our achievements. But this praise is hypocritical and insincere, the speaker implies, because it's the opposite of what the same people used to say about us. Thus, the speaker denies older people even the comfort of believing they will leave proud legacies behind. Even the highest reputations, the poem suggests, are themselves "hollow," and liable to change from one moment to the next.
When we near the end of our lives, the speaker claims, "the world" starts to shower us with praise that we can't truly enjoy. By the time we're near death, we're emotionally "frozen up," so we can't take real satisfaction from praise to begin with. Even if we could, the praise signals a suspicious change in attitude. To grow old, the speaker says, is "To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost / Which blamed the living man." In other words, the same people who criticized us when we were at the height of our abilities turn around and applaud us when we're shells of our former selves. Their sudden praise is impossible to savor because it's impossible to take seriously.
Broadly, then, the poem implies that reverence for the elderly is shallow, and any reputation we hope to leave behind is flimsy at best. The speaker doesn't say why the world changes its attitude toward the very old but implies that this about-face is phony and superficial. It could be sentimental or driven by guilt; it could also be driven by greed (dying people often leave inheritances behind!). Regardless, the "applau[se]," which might seem to be a perk of aging, turns out to be yet another downside. It may even be the worst downside, since its phoniness kills any dream of a secure legacy that will outlive us.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Growing Old”
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Lines 1-5
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."Growing Old" is a very logically structured poem; it's about exactly what its title suggests. The first stanza lays out the theme clearly, in a didactic (lesson-like) style. The speaker begins with three rhetorical questions:
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?The speaker asks first what old age is like, and then whether it fulfills popular stereotypes. Does old age mean losing the "glory" of one's "form," or body? Does it mean losing the "luster," or gleam of alertness, in one's "eye"? (This second question might also hint at loss of eyesight, since some vision problems, such as cataracts, can cause the eyes to water or cloud over.) Does it mean giving up the metaphorical victory "wreath" of "beauty," as other, younger people assume the honor of being considered beautiful? In short: does old age mean that your physical grace, alertness (or eyesight), and sex appeal deteriorate?
These questions are followed by a blunt, ominous answer: "—Yes, but not this alone." In other words, all these clichés about aging are true, but there's more to the story than that.
The speaker seems to have some authority on the subject of aging. In other words, he (the poem's final line suggests he's male) feels qualified to address these common fears about growing older. Matthew Arnold was only in middle age when he wrote the poem, so the speaker may or may not literally be the poet!
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Lines 6-10
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?
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Lines 11-15
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. -
Lines 16-20
’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. -
Lines 21-25
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. -
Lines 26-30
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. -
Lines 31-35
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.
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“Growing Old” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Repetition
"Growing Old" is structured around repetition—specifically, a repetitive series of rhetorical questions and answers. In lines 1-10, the speaker asks about the nature of old age, using parallel phrasing each time:
What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose [...]
Is it for beauty [...]Is it to feel our strength [...]
Is it to feel each limb [...]The speaker then answers his own questions, again using parallel or repetitive phrasing, as in lines 5 ("Yes, but not this alone") and 11 ("Yes, this, and more"). He repeatedly declares, with the help of anaphora, what aging isn't ("'Tis not to [...] 'Tis not to") and what it is ("It is to [...] It is to"). The result is a highly logical structure that suits the poem's didactic purpose. In other words, the poet/speaker is trying to teach the reader a lesson, so he makes the lesson easy to follow and hammers home his point.
He also uses other forms of repetition along the way, such as the diacope in lines 24-25: "month / To month with weary pain." Here, the repeated word helps capture the repetitiveness of aging itself—the way old age brings a seemingly endless series of painful days.
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Rhetorical Question
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Allusion
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Caesura
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Metaphor
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“Growing Old” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- The form
- Luster
- Forego
- Wreath
- Bloom
- Function
- 'Tis
- 'Twould
- Rapt
- Immured
- Festers
- Blamed
The form-
The body.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Growing Old”
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Form
"Growing Old" has an unusual form that combines two meters. Its five-line stanzas, or cinquains, feature alternating lines of iambic trimeter (three-beat lines with a da-DUM, da-DUM rhythm) and iambic pentameter (five-beat lines, same rhythm). It has no rhyme scheme—no rhymes at all, in fact—so its style sounds fairly plain, in keeping with its spirit of unvarnished truth-telling.
There's no name for this form; it's basically one that Arnold devised himself for the purposes of the poem. It vaguely evokes blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), which features in many classic English poems and plays, except that the shorter, interspersed lines make up the majority of the poem. Perhaps the staggered alternation between long and short lines is meant to convey short-windedness, as if the aging speaker lacks the energy for a whole poem's worth of pentameter. The phrase "lose the glory of the form" (line 2) could also be a clue. Perhaps this weary speaker, rather than taking on any of the conventional forms of the English tradition, is making do with a less glorious substitute.
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Meter
"Growing Old" combines two meters. It alternates between lines of iambic trimeter (three-beat lines that generally follow a da-DUM, da-DUM rhythm) and iambic pentameter (five-beat lines that follow the same rhythm). One can hear this pattern clearly in lines 16-20, for example:
’Tis not | to see | the world
As from | a height, | with rapt | prophet- | ic eyes,
And heart | profound- | ly stirred;
And weep, | and feel | the full- | ness of | the past,
The years | that are | no more.Not all the lines are so rhythmically predictable; like most metrical poems, this one varies the meter sometimes for expressive effect. For instance, line 5 starts with a trochee (a metrical foot with a DUM-da rhythm) rather than an iamb (da-DUM):
—Yes, but | not this | alone.
This has the effect of emphasizing "Yes," which is the poem's first confirmation that old age is no fun.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem has no rhyme scheme or rhyming of any kind. In English poetry, the use of meter without rhyme is relatively uncommon, outside of blank verse and old-fashioned accentual verse. ("Growing Old" qualifies as neither.) The absence of rhyme here makes the language sound stark and unadorned, as if the poet has little interest in appealing to the reader's ear. In other words, it fits the poem's mission: to tell blunt, harsh truths about aging.
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“Growing Old” Speaker
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Matthew Arnold was only in his early- to mid-40s when he wrote "Growing Old," so it's fair to wonder whether the speaker is supposed to be the poet himself. The answer is: maybe! Average lifespans were shorter in the 1800s than they are now, and Arnold himself lived only to age 65. The poem might be expressing Arnold's experience of older age—or what he considered older age—but it might also be expressing his fears about aging, via a speaker who's supposed to be genuinely elderly.
Clearly, the speaker (a "man," as the final line suggests) is past his prime. He speaks with the authority of someone who's "grow[n] old" himself and believes his experience is typical. (That's why he generalizes his experience, using first-person plural pronouns like "we" and "our" rather than singular pronouns like "I" and "my.") In line 12, for example, he declares that old age is "not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!" He may even have reached the age where he no longer "feel[s]" that he was "ever young" (line 22).
But the poem is at least partly a work of imagination, as opposed to firsthand testimony. The final stanza describes growing so old that "we" no longer feel like a "living man," but rather a "hollow ghost." This conjures up the image of someone at death's door—or someone who's dead already! So while the speaker may voice Arnold's own disgust with aging, fears about his legacy (as a writer whom "the world" might "applaud" only briefly), etc., the poem ultimately departs from his literal experience.
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“Growing Old” Setting
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"Growing Old" doesn't have a defined setting. It's a meditative poem about old age in general rather than a description of a particular person's old age. The absence of setting detail (physical, temporal, or geographical) gives the poem a universal quality: it could be describing old age for anyone, anywhere, at any time.
The speaker does mention that old age locks people, metaphorically, in "the hot prison of the present." In other words, the pain and confusion of growing old gradually make people forget about both the past and the future. So this might be another reason the poem withholds all setting detail: in order to mimic the sense of confinement and disorientation some elderly people feel.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Growing Old”
Literary Context
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was one of the preeminent poets and critics of England's Victorian era. "Growing Old" appears in his 1867 collection New Poems, which also includes his famous "Dover Beach." Like "Dover Beach," it offers a bitterly pessimistic view of life, which it refuses to sugarcoat in any way.
Many critics have read "Growing Old" as a retort to another famous Victorian poet (and poem). Robert Browning's popular dramatic monologue "Rabbi Ben Ezra" (1864), published a few years before Arnold's poem, begins with the well-known couplet: "Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be [...]" Browning's speaker paints a relatively sunny portrait of old age, which he suggests might bring us "peace at last!" Arnold's poem seeks to crush that notion altogether.
The final stanza of "Growing Old"—particularly the phrase "last stage of all"—also echoes the famous "All the world's a stage" soliloquy from Shakespeare's play As You Like It (c. 1603). This speech, delivered by the melancholy character Jaques, lists the various stages (or "ages") of man's life. After describing some of the ravages of old age, the speech ends:
[...] Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.In the same melancholy spirit, Arnold warns that old age snatches away all our joys and comforts.
In its pessimism and spiritual doubt, Arnold's poetry is sometimes considered a forerunner of the 20th-century modernist and existentialist movements. Among Victorian poets, Thomas Hardy probably comes closest to expressing a similar worldview. Hardy, too, examines the erosion of faith in a world dominated by science and provides a largely unconsoling view of life and death.
Historical Context
The 19th century, which encompassed most of the UK's Victorian era (1837-1901), profoundly changed the way humanity saw its place in the world. In the 1830s, for example, Charles Lyell's innovations in the study of geology cast serious doubt on the biblical account of the world's creation. During the early decades of the century, fossil collector Mary Anning discovered prehistoric skeletons in the beach areas of southern England, further upending conventional accounts of the world's history. Advances in evolutionary biology, including Charles Darwin's monumental 1859 study On the Origin of Species, challenged the idea that humanity occupies the center of a divinely created universe.
In short, Matthew Arnold was writing in a time of large-scale readjustment and anxiety. "Growing Old" doesn't refer to any of these historical and scientific developments, or to any topical events at all. But the poem's anxious pessimism may partly reflect the spirit of its times. Though only in his 40s, Arnold expected the rest of his life to be one long decline—and not the "golden" kind. He ranked among the literary giants of his age, but this poem, with its complaints about excessive "blame" and phony "applau[se]" alike, suggests that he feared "the world" would be unkind to his reputation.
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More “Growing Old” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poet's Life and Work — Read a short biography of Matthew Arnold at the Poetry Foundation.
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Arnold and the Victorian Era — Read an introduction to the literary and historical period with which Arnold is closely associated.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of "Growing Old."
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More About the Poet — More information about, and poems by, Arnold at Poets.org.
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The Poem in Context — Read "Growing Old" in an 1867 edition of Arnold's poems.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Matthew Arnold
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