How by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1873)

Name: How
Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"How" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox is a lyric meditation on youth, aging, and the defiant fantasy of escaping Time through early death. The speaker opens in anguish, personifying Time as a cruel force that will inevitably mark her brow, drain the light from her eyes, silver her brown hair, and freeze the vital current of joy that now fills and thrills her veins. Time is cast as an adversary, patient and merciless, who will reduce her living warmth to something as still and cold as a river locked in winter. Confronted with this prospect, the speaker pivots to a darkly romantic counter-strategy: she imagines dying before her youth has fully faded, slipping away to a "closet dim," closing her eyes, and lying white and cold with her hands folded over her breast. In this scenario, she would remain forever young beneath the green churchyard mould — her song half sung, her tale half told. The world, she acknowledges, would notice her absence for a day, ask when the rest of her story would be told, and then continue blithely forward, its own hopes curdling into fears as its own young grew old. The brevity and indifference of the world's grief is noted without self-pity; the point is not to be mourned but to be preserved. In the final movement, the speaker imagines herself lying undisturbed in the earth while Time, cheated of its prize, beats furiously on her grave and howls that she refused the bargain — youth surrendered in exchange for the slow decay of age. She would feel nothing, care nothing, lying deep and still through a thousand seasons. She closes with a triumphant taunt — "Ho, ho, old Time, I may cheat you yet!" — claiming victory through permanent youth purchased at the price of life itself. The poem's central tension is the grim paradox at its core: the only certain way to preserve youth is to die before it is lost. Wilcox does not resolve this paradox sentimentally. The speaker does not actually choose death; she entertains it as a rhetorical weapon, a gambit against the inevitability of age. The tone is theatrical and defiant rather than genuinely suicidal — the bravado of someone who cannot bear to imagine herself old, and who finds in the idea of an early death a kind of perverse comfort and power. Formally, the poem employs irregular stanzas with internal rhyme and varied line lengths that create a rushing, breathless energy, mimicking the tide-like vitality the speaker fears losing. The contrast between the poem's animated, almost playful rhythm and its subject — mortality — reinforces the speaker's youthful refusal to go quietly into decline.

By Ella Wheeler Wilcox · First published 1873 · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Philosophical Poetry, Romantic Poetry · 476 words

First lines

How can I let my youth go by? / How can I let Time mark my brow, / And steal the light of a laughing eye, / And whiten the locks that are nut brown now. / And the tide that goes, / And ripples, and flows, / Like a beautiful river, on forever, / Over my head, through every vein, / And fills me, and thrills me, with joy like pain, / Old cruel Time, / With a touch of rime, / Will drug, and chill, and freeze, until / It likes a stream, / In its winter dream.

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How is listed on Textopian as a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, dated 1873 CE.

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Work type: Poem
Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Date: 1873 CE
Language: English
Genres: Lyric Poetry, Philosophical Poetry, Romantic Poetry, Metaphysical Poetry, Dramatic Poetry
Length: 476 words
Structure: 1 section, 3 paragraphs
Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)

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Genres

Lyric Poetry — The poem expresses the speaker's personal emotions and meditations on aging, time, and mortality through an introspective and emotionally charged voice.
Philosophical Poetry — Engages deeply with existential questions about the nature of time, mortality, youth, and the human desire to escape aging's inevitability.
Romantic Poetry — Features intense emotional expression, personification of natural forces and abstract concepts, and emphasis on individual feeling over reason, central to Romantic tradition.
Metaphysical Poetry — Explores abstract concepts about existence, mortality, time's nature, and the relationship between human consciousness and the passage of years.