Song of the Old Mother by W. B. Yeats (1899)

I RISE in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow.
And then I must scrub, and bake, and sweep,
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;
But the young lie long and dream in their bed
Of the matching of ribbons, the blue and the red,
And their day goes over in idleness,
And they sigh if the wind but lift up a tress.
While I must work, because I am old
And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.

W.B. Yeats is one of the symbolist poets of the time, who lived from 1865 to 1939, was Anglo-Irish, with leanings of Irish nationalism that he tended to keep to himself more often than not, and was interested in Irish mythology and the mystical. That last bit is what informs many of his poems, as he tended to include allusions to Irish myth and/or the occult in his poetry. 

In this poem the most obvious story being told is that of an old woman who gets up and works throughout the day while the younger folks dilly dally and spend their days with their heads in the sky and not thinking about anything worthwhile. There are more levels than that, though, as symbolists tend towards; the "old mother" mentioned in the title is the narrator, but whether she is actually the mother of the children that she is complaining about or whether she is an old woman thinking in general about the state of the youth today could be debated. The poem also deals with the dawn as a time for things to start beginning, moving around and such, a theme which is common in symbolist poetry. It deals with the passage of time from the beginning of the dawn to the dusk later that day, with the "fire flicker and glow" showing it as the beginning of the day and the "seed of the fire gets feeble and cold" showing that the day has come to an end - only showing it with the state of the fire rather than speaking directly. 

The young are mentioned as being in a dream - though in this case it could mean that they are literally dreaming and therefore asleep, not doing chores like the old mother is, or it could refer simply to being in a dream-like state and not paying attention to the real world or the work that is involved in it, simply paying attention to what they are going to wear or other unrelated, non-productive things.