Growing Old
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,
At golden day's decline...
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.
- Matthew Arnold (lived 66 years) |
"Age only matters
when one is aging."
- Pablo Picasso (lived 92 years) |
"I feel age like an
icicle down my back."
- Dyson Carter |
"Old age is an island
surrounded by death."
- Juan Montalvo (lived 52 years) |
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