John Freeman, an English poet and critic associated with the Georgian movement in the early twentieth century, wrote “In Those Old Days” as a love poem that refuses the usual worship of youthful beauty. The speaker addresses a long-familiar partner whose face and body have aged, yet the poem is not an elegy for lost bloom. Its central idea is that love can transform physical beauty into something inward, durable, and almost spiritual. Freeman sets this meditation in the context of a shared life, where the beloved’s aging is not merely the work of time but of love itself.
The opening stanza begins with a plain declaration: “In those old days you were called beautiful.” Then comes a startling shift of responsibility: “But I have worn the beauty from your face.” The verb “worn” suggests long intimacy and friction, not passive decay. The “flowerlike bloom” has withered, but the fire in the beloved’s eyes “burns darker now and deeper, feeding on / Beauty and the remembrance of things gone.” Youthful prettiness gives way to a fiercer, more knowing flame. Even the voice is “altered” or “grown mute with old anxiety / For me.” The final two words, “For me,” break away from the sentence and land as a private refrain, suggesting that the beloved’s sacrifices have always been offered to the speaker.
The second stanza deepens the fire imagery. Like a fire that first leaps “in its lovely flight,” the beloved once burned with youthful delight. Now, however, “under the flame a glowing dome / Deepens slowly into blood-like light.” That “blood-like light” is not soft or merely comforting; it is alive, bodily, and tinged with pain. The beloved is “hollow’d now with aching fire,” yet the speaker does not turn away. He says, “But I still warm me and make there my home.” The hollowed fire becomes a hearth. Beauty and youth “burn there invisibly / For me,” meaning they have not disappeared but have changed from something seen to something felt.
The third stanza is intensely tactile. “Now my lips falling on your silver’d skull, / My fingers in the valleys of your cheeks” turns age into a landscape worthy of touch. The phrase “silver’d skull” is deliberately unromantic, yet in context it becomes tender. The hands are “thin strong hands fast caught,” bodies are “clutched,” and the speaker bends to the beloved with desperate closeness. Then the poem moves beyond the body: “Now love undying feeds on love beautiful, / Now, now I am but thought kissing your thought.” The repeated “now” insists on the present moment as the true site of love. The closing question arrives after a dash, full of wonder: “can it be in your heart’s music speaks / A deeper rhythm hearing mine: can it be / Indeed for me?” The musical words “rhythm” and “music” echo the poem’s own pulsing meter and suggest that two lives have fallen into harmony.
Freeman uses loose iambic pentameter, the traditional line for English love poetry, but roughens it with enjambment and irregular pauses. The rhyme is not strict, though clusters such as “flight,” “light,” and “delight” create moments of lyric fullness before the syntax spills forward. Each stanza ends with the same two-word refrain, “For me,” giving the poem a shape of return and deepening intimacy. The poem is significant because it locates beauty not in smooth skin but in a “silver’d skull” and hollowed cheeks. It insists that long love does not simply watch beauty fade; it translates beauty into an invisible fire, and it asks, with genuine awe, whether such devotion can really be meant “for me.”