Lessons from Biden in knowing how to age

William Butler Yeats wrote poems of a gentle, exquisite beauty but he was also capable of a brutal self-honesty, evident in the poems he wrote in the last year of his life.

In “The Circus Animal’s Desertion,” the poet mocks his entire career as a writer. “My circus animals were all on show,” he writes, bitterly describing how he tried and failed to live up to his own high expectations and visions.

By the end, he’s lying in a garbage pit filled with broken, hideous things: “Now that my ladder's gone / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”.

Watching the agonising and sorrowful decline of President Biden, I’ve often thought of this poem. It is a poem about a great and talented man acutely conscious of how age has sapped his energy; alienated those closest to him; and eroded his own sense of self.

The opening lines capture the magic and vigour of his personality – his proud creations, the circus animals, his admirers, the acrobatic boys, his success symbolised by the golden chariot – and they also spell out the despair and affront of old age, of at last “being but a broken man”.

“Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.”

The desertion of one’s admirers and the depletion of one’s reserves are of the most acute challenges to a lifetime.

The great conundrum of ageing is of course that we all want to live to a ripe old age, but we don’t want to become aged and decrepit in the process. Judaism has long recognised this in its championing for a long life but also being mindful of King David‘s poignant plea to the Almighty: “Do not cast me off in the time of my old age; when my strength fails, forsake me not“ (Psalms 71:9).