I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue
and again:
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.
I do not know what age Mr. Yeats was when he wrote those lines, but they are included in a collection of poems, dated "1912-1914," and at most he could not have been fifty, for he was born in Dublin in 1865.
The sense of age seems to have oppressed his mind for many years, perhaps for the whole of his creative life. He feels that he has outlived his generation and is lost in a period of time peculiarly alien to him.
When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs