But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

These lines, from W. B. Yeats’s delicate love poem “When You Are Old”, always remind me of what true love means.

Picture a bedroom in the small hours, the lamp turned low. A woman lies propped on pillows, her hands resting on the blanket, the knuckles swollen into shapes they never had in youth, the fingers drifted sideways like reeds after a gale. A man sits beside her. He has sat there most nights for five years. He knows which side she can bear to lie on, how warm the water must be before it touches her wrists, the weight of the cup she could still lift last spring and the morning she could not.

His jacket hangs on the back of the chair, and in its inside pocket his wallet keeps a photograph worn soft at the corners. A girl of eighteen stands beside a big black dog, her hand resting on its head. She gave it to him the day he left for the war. He carried it through the fighting and home again, and through fifty years of marriage, until the gloss rubbed thin where his thumb found her face. That girl ran barefoot to the shore and laughed at the cold. Illness has taken her somewhere he cannot follow.

What remains is a face thinned by pain, a body that flinches beneath the sheet, a voice that sometimes apologises for the trouble. He answers by staying. He brushes her hair in slow strokes, careful of her scalp. He has learned the language of the night: the tick of the clock, rain against the glass, the change in her breathing a moment before the pain wakes her. His own back has set into the shape of the chair.

Youth loves what it admires, and has the whole morning to spend. The love Yeats names belongs to a later hour. It stays through the long tending, after the beauty has gone and the vitality with it, and keeps faith with the face through every one of its sorrows.

In the poem, Love flees to the mountains and hides his face among the stars. Some love, though, never gets lost in the firmament. The man draws the chair closer to the bed and stays through the last night, his hand around hers, gentle even then with the swollen joints. To him, it is still the hand of the girl in the photograph.