LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Ahhh....This was the first poem I ever memorised (probably the last, too) when I was about 10, at which age the 20-year-old poet seems immeasurably and unreachably mature.... Oh, f(&*.
3 comments:
As a third of this poem is spent calculating the poet's age I've never really understood its popularity.
Perhaps because it encapsulates the brevity of life and the extraordinary beauty around us that we have to appreciate while we can. A.k.a. the human condition?
My brother tells me that in the end Housman had an extra 7 springs. His dates were March 26, 1859 – April 30, 1936.
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