Robert Frost wrote a two-line poem, "The Span of Life." It is only sixteen words long and its main focus is a dog, but it speaks volumes about the subject of aging. When I taught poetry, I used this little verse to illustrate the way the sounds and rhythms of language could reinforce and supplement meaning.

The poem reads:

The old dog barks backwards without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup.

It is a simple couplet of anapestic tetrameter, if I may slip back into the language of my former profession. The opening line, however, is drastically irregular. The three-and-a-half-word sequence "old dog barks back- "is a succession of four accented syllables. A rare thing in English poetry. I will spare you all the technical terminology about English consonants that explains the pronunciation difficulty of separating the sequential "d’s" in "old dog"; the alliteration of the letter "b" in "barks" and "backwards"; the three assonant vowel sounds in those two words. Suffice it to say that our tongues have a halting difficulty pronouncing line one. Even if we are reading silently, I think we mentally "hear" the words and the fact that they don’t flow easily one to another. That difficulty does more to convey the stiffness and debility of an aged dog than would a whole paragraph of veterinary description about loss of joint flexion, hip dysplasia, and arthritis.

In contrast, however, line two has metrical regularity. Its nasal m’s, liquid labials, and terminal plosives lend to the line a merry and sprightly prance such as the dog must have possessed in his early, tail-wagging, doggy days. Thus the poet has in his couplet given us first a sound picture of the dog near the end of his life, followed immediately by a line evoking playful puppyhood. The contrasting images are generated more through the sound and the rhythm of the words than through their sense or denotative meaning.

Furthermore, this is not merely a portrait of a geriatric canine. The words of the speaker magically reflect back on himself and perhaps on all humankind. The suggestion is strong that the speaker himself exhibits (or will exhibit) the same bodily decrepitude that he describes in the dog–else why would he have titled the poem "The Span of Life" instead of something like "A Dog’s Life"?

The poetry texts that feature this poem content themselves with explaining that in line one the aged animal is looking over his shoulder to greet his master/mistress without rising from his recumbent posture and cavorting as he did when a pup. I think the textbook authors are purposely being delicate.The combination of sound and sense involved in the words of line one strongly suggest that the backward barking may be a noise of a different sort accompanied by a borborygmic odor. Think of a four-letter word that sounds something like "bark." Think of a gastric problem that often plagues sedentary humans of advanced years. The cynosure of assonance!

In the classroom I followed the discussion of this poem with a reading of John Crowe Ransom’s "Blue Girls"–a less playful variation on the theme of aging, which directs itself at females, whereas Frost’s poem was exclusively masculine.

Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,

Go listen to your teachers old and contrary

Without believing a word.

Tie the white fillets then about your hair

And think no more of what will come to pass

Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass

And chattering on the air.

Practise your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;

And I will cry with my loud lips and publish

Beauty which all our power shall never establish,

It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;

I know a lady with a terrible tongue,

Blear eyes fallen from blue,

All her perfections tarnished–yet it is not long

Since she was lovelier than any of you.

Ransom’s private school, uniform-garbed girls, like chattering bluebirds, are rather different from this generation’s high school girls of the Ohmygod-like totally-Staci with an "i"- mall crawling variety. But teenaged girls of all generations possess the blithe conviction that they will never grow old and lose their youthful freshness. That counting their age in numbers above the twenties will never happen–at least not for a century or more. My wife recalls a doctor lecturing her when she was fifteen or sixteen about the necessity of rehabilitating a leg injured in a skiing accident. He spoke of arthritic effects that might come when she reached her forties. The doctor’s warnings fell on deaf ears because to her the idea of ever being as ancient as forty was inconceivable.

Blue girls then and now spend a lot of time in front of a mirror, but unlike the speaker of Sylvia Plath’s poem "Mirror," wherein the object of the title becomes metaphorically a lake, they don’t see a drowned young girl nor "an old woman/ [who] "Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish."

In "Dover Beach, a Note to That Poem" Archibald MacLeish writes of old age and what he calls "its lovely uses." "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom" says William Butler Yeats, in "After Long Silence. Finally, to quote the esteemed poet, Groucho Marx, "Growing old is nothing to worry about…when you consider the alternative."