WARNING

Taking title into consideration, the reader may expect the poem to deal with something the speaking voice is afraid of or wants to make the reader aware of.

It's a poem because the text is arranged into 4 stanzas with a different pattern: the first stanza is longer than the others, while the second and the third ones have the same length, the shorter one is the last.

The poet may have written stanzas with a different length because he wants to reflect for a longer time on the first stanza, while the other ones have less importance to the writer.

The poem is voiced by a young woman who imagines what she shall do when she will become old.

Now that she is young she worries about what the others think about her but when she will become an old woman she will do everything she wants because she will be no longer interested in others' opinions about her aspect or her behaviours.

In the first stanza the young woman lists all the things she's going to do when she will become old.

At the beginning of most of the lines the poet uses the word “and” as to reinforce even more the list the speaking voice is doing and to point out all the ideas she's thinking of.

In the first line there is an alliteration of “a” that forces the reader to read slower and that makes him lingering on this words, that are a key expression to understand the poem.

In line 8 there is another alliteration of the letter “y” that makes the reader accelerating as to highlight the elusiveness of youth, that finishes in a second.

In the next stanza the woman continues her list.

In the second and fourth lines is repeated the word “and”, as in the first stanza, and in the last line of the stanza this repetition points out even more the amount of things that the woman takes into consideration.

In the third stanza there is a setting change along the time, from the future the speaking voice returns to the present and talks about what she has to do to please the others.

This setting is underlined by the verbs used that are all in Simple Present and they are expressed as orders coming from the others as the reader can understand from the use of “must”.

In the last stanza the woman introduces a question: she asks to herself if she shall start already practicing to behave without giving importance to the others' opinion.

In the second line there is the alliteration of letter “o” as the speaking voice is lingering when she is saying this words.

The poem talks about how people feel about others' opinion at different ages. When we are young we want to be accepted from the others, we want to please them.

When we become older, we are more independent, we don't give anymore the same importance to the judgments as we did during our youth. We live our lives in the way we want.