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    Growing Old by Matthew Arnold

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    romina
    Growing old is not a gentle decline like a golden sunset. It involves the slow loss of physical strength and mental acuity, as each month brings more pain and less feeling. In old age, one becomes a hollow ghost of their former self, still applauded by the world but no longer fully alive within. Growing old is a long imprisonment in the present without the passions of youth, leaving only dull memories of what once was.

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    Growing Old by Matthew Arnold

    Uploaded by

    romina
    280 views1 page
    Growing old is not a gentle decline like a golden sunset. It involves the slow loss of physical strength and mental acuity, as each month brings more pain and less feeling. In old age, one becomes a hollow ghost of their former self, still applauded by the world but no longer fully alive within. Growing old is a long imprisonment in the present without the passions of youth, leaving only dull memories of what once was.

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    Growing old is not a gentle decline like a golden sunset. It involves the slow loss of physical strength and mental acuity, as each month brings more pain and less feeling. In old age, one becomes a hollow ghost of their former self, still applauded by the world but no longer fully alive within. Growing old is a long imprisonment in the present without the passions of youth, leaving only dull memories of what once was.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    280 views1 page

    Growing Old by Matthew Arnold

    Uploaded by

    romina
    Growing old is not a gentle decline like a golden sunset. It involves the slow loss of physical strength and mental acuity, as each month brings more pain and less feeling. In old age, one becomes a hollow ghost of their former self, still applauded by the world but no longer fully alive within. Growing old is a long imprisonment in the present without the passions of youth, leaving only dull memories of what once was.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
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    Growing Old by

    Matthew Arnold

    What is it to grow old? 6 syllables It is to spend long days

    Is it to lose the glory of the form, 10 syllables And not once feel that we were ever young;

    The luster of the eye? 6 syllables It is to add, immured

    Is it for beauty to forgo her wreath? 10 syllables In the hot prison of the present, month

    —Yes, but not this alone. 6 syllables To month with weary pain.

    Is it to feel our strength— It is to suffer this,

    Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay? And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.

    Is it to feel each limb Deep in our hidden heart

    Grow stiffer, every function less exact, Festers the dull remembrance of a change,

    Each nerve more loosely strung? But no emotion—none.

    Yes, this, and more; but not It is—last stage of all—

    Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be! When we are frozen up within, and quite

    ’Tis not to have our life The phantom of ourselves,

    Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost

    A golden day’s decline. Which blamed the living man.

    ’Tis not to see the world


    Theme: aging; what it feels like to grow old.
    As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
    References:
    And heart profoundly stirred;
    Metaphor
    And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,
    Euphemism
    The years that are no more.
    Imagery

    Repetition

    Alliteration

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