You Are Old, Father William

Everyone who writes about aging “Boomers”—how “they” have ruined “our” society, and so on, ad nauseum—should be required to memorize Lewis Carroll’s “You Are Old, Father William” (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and recite it aloud before an audience of men and women age seventy or older. Haughton explains that Carroll’s poem is a response to a now little-read poem by Robert Southey: “Carroll’s parody,” Haughton says, “undermines the pious didacticism of Southey’s dialogue and gives Father William an eccentric vitality that rebounds upon his idiot questioner.” The world of old age today has a good deal in common with old age as it has been for thousands of years while at the same time being quite different.

Source: www.firstthings.com