“Growing Old” as the name says is a poem where Arnold beautifully explains how it feels when one grows old. In the beginning of the poem, he gives a wonderful question, ‘How does it feel to grow old?’ He just puts in simple words asking whether it is just loosing beauty, or whether it is loosing the luster of the eye or just loosing the looks? Growing old is far beyond all these is what he says.
In the second stanza he asks a few questions which gets related to the internal aging, when compared to the first which says about the external looks. Here he asks whether aging is about the feel of loosing our strength, or is it to feel that each of our limbs getting stiffer and not experiencing the ease that it had when we were young, or is it like feeling each nerve getting week?
In the third stanza, he says that growing old is much beyond all these feelings. We never dream of ourselves getting old or how it would be when we get old. Getting old is the first step which shows that the youth in ourselves is declining and the golden days are gone!
The next stanza says that, the world does not remain the same. At our youth, we feel that we have captured the world, but later we realize, that was just a feel and it is no more the way we saw and we will never get those days back.
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Gradually, when we get old, we will be having longer days and nothing to do and then we start just pushing each day month on month, thinking of our past and the great times we had, realizing nothing is going to return back. It is just like being in a prison, the present would be.
We feel hard to get along, we feel very feeble, but still we hope that one day we get our past and we live in fond remembrance of the great times and realize what we suffer now.
In the last para, the poet depicts our death, when we lay frozen and quiet, we see the world applaud the dead man and his great deeds, and however we were always blaming ourselves when we were alive.
A great poem which describes each stages of life and beautiful described, how it feels when one gets old not being able to do things like in youth and how one deeply desires that , they get back those days.