Growing old

“I grow old. . . I grow old. . . /I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. . .,” so wrote T. S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  Learning that he started writing the poem in 1910 -- it was published in 1915 -- when the poet, born in 1888, was only 22 years old, I realized how shockingly young to think about aging and express it so touchingly and  W. B. Yeats, born in 1865, was only 35 in 1910; he lived till 1939, and only when he reached 60/61 in 1926 he wrote, "An aged man is a but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick. . ." in his Sailing to Byzantium.  Having somehow kept the impression of T. S. Eliot as a leading modern poet opposite Yeats, a bit of a Victorian legacy, I am also astonished not only how young he was but also how early in the 20th century he wrote. How old were The Beatles when they sang "When I'm Sixty-Four"?  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in which the song appeared, was released in 1967, and Paul McCarney was 27.  As for myself, I hardly thought about growing old before sixty-four, or for that matter even thereafter. . . well, perhaps on rare fleeting moments after seventy-seven.