The Best is Yet To Come
The Old Age is one of the prime issues for
Literature. How society provides necessities and comfort to older generation is
the criterion of its evolution. The old age is embodiment of all types of
physical and mental degeneration. The consumption of youth is old age and
consumption of old age is death. The inevitability has an unexpectedness and
epiphany in store.
The Time has arrived to change your old
tattered coat and get a new one. The Master has already chosen a perfect design
that would suit you best. He has already forgiven all your sins and Kingdom of
Heaven is waiting for you.
Literature has deep connections with old
age. Every great poet has written at least something about it. Every person has
his own perception of old age. What is the age when a person can be called old?
Being a senior citizen is different from
being an old man. How old is really old that everybody would agree is old. How
does anybody matter if that person himself does not agree to it.
The NY Times
has many views of its readers on this topic. The range is wide. Some believe
that 30 is the onset of old age while others believe that 75 is a good age to
be labeled as old. It seems that every person becomes old at different age.
There are many external factors that determine the oldness of a person. How
disciplined life you have lived? Were you moderate in your approach? Did you
sin and never heard the voice of conscience? Have you earned the love and
respect of your family and friends?
Not only the factors that are in your hand,
but also there are factors over which you had no control. Have you inherited a
strong body? All those to whom you loved and cared are safe and healthy? Have
you attended many funerals of your loved one younger to you?
Robert Browning in his poem Rabbi
Ben Ezra said
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was
made:
In fact, all the thirty-two stanzas in this
poem are full of wisdom to accept the old age and depart happily.
W. B. Yeats in his poem “Sailing to
Byzantium” declares
There is no country for old men.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,
W. B. Yeats in his poem “The
Tower” cries
What shall I do with this absurdity
O heart, O troubled heart - This caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail.
Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem "Ulysses"
said
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
At the end of this poem Tennyson revealed
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in
will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to
yield.
R. W. Emerson in "Terminus"
accepts
It is time to be old,
To take in sail:-
DH. Lawrence in "Beautiful
Old Age" expects
It ought to be lovely to be old
King Lear in a play by Shakespeare
laments
I am very foolish fond old man…
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
“The old man and the Sea” by Ernest
Hemingway is a saga of an old man who had a strong will power and conquers
the nature.
The literature is quite optimistic about old
age.
“The
Old Man and the Nymph” show how life force of nymphs can rejuvenate the
old age.
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© Vipin Behari Goyal
Advocate, Rajasthan High Court, Jodhpur, India
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