On Growing Old
Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying;
My dog and I are old, too old for roving.
Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying,
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.
I take the book and gather to the fire,
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute
The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire,
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.
I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
Your cornland, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys
Ever again, nor share the battle yonder
Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.
Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.
Beauty, have pity! for the strong have power,
The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace,
Summer of man its sunlight and its flower,
Spring-time of man all April in a face.
Only, as in the jostling in the Strand,
Where the mob thrusts or loiters or is loud,
The beggar with the saucer in his hand
Asks only a penny from the passing crowd,
So, from this glittering world with all its fashion,
Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march,
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,
Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch.
Give me but these, and, though the darkness close,
Even the night will blossom as the rose.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on May 24, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
One of John Masefield’s best-known poems, “On Growing Old,” was first published in the August 1919 issue of The Atlantic, later appearing in several volumes of his collected verse. About the poem, poet John Gould Fletcher writes in his essay “John Masefield: A Study,” published in The North American Review, Vol. 212, No. 779 (October 1920), “Here Masefield speaks with the ageless voice of maturity, of that maturity which is at once a tragic burden of knowledge, and yet an unsurpassable and indestructible treasure-house of beauty. He has exchanged the fierce exultant enthusiasm of youth and young manhood for the penetrating wisdom of middle age. To be able to say, once and for all, ‘Be with me, beauty, for the fire is dying,’ is to state in a phrase the full significance of the past and to hold forth a lonely torch of hope for the future.”
John Masefield
John Edward Masefield was an English poet and children’s fiction writer born June 1, 1878, in Ledbury, Herefordshire, England. Following the deaths of both his parents, six-year-old Masefield, now under the guardianship of his aunt, was sent to board at the King’s School in Warwick (now, the Warwick School). In 1891, seeking to break his “addiction” to reading as well as train him for a naval career, Masefield’s aunt sent him to embark on the HMS Conway.