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.
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Glossary · Related Poems
Summary
A young man stops in front of a flowering cherry, works out on the spot how many springs he has left, and decides the only reasonable thing to do is look at the tree more often. That is the entire poem. What lifts it above the sentiment on a greeting card is the cold little sum in the second stanza and one swapped word in the last line.
Background
Loveliest of Trees is the second poem in A Shropshire Lad, the 1896 sequence Housman published at his own expense after the trade houses passed on it. The Shropshire of the title is largely invented. Housman grew up in Worcestershire and knew the county he made famous mostly from maps and the far blue look of its hills on the horizon, which is part of the point: this is a landscape kept at a distance, the land of lost content, easier to love because it was never quite home.
One biographical fact earns its place before the second stanza. Housman spent his working life as a classical scholar, among the most exacting editors of Latin verse who ever lived, a man who could give years to restoring a single damaged line of Manilius. The arithmetic that drives the middle of this poem is not a charming flourish. Counting precisely was simply how his mind ran. And threescore years and ten comes straight from Psalm 90, where seventy years is the span set aside for a human life. The poem takes that allowance as fixed and does the subtraction.
Analysis and Themes
Three things hold the poem up, and none of them is the cherry tree. There is a subtraction problem dropped into the middle of a lyric, there is a single noun exchanged between the first stanza and the last, and there is a response to mortality so small it barely counts as one.
The Math Problem in the Middle
The second stanza is a sum performed out loud. Seventy years, minus the twenty already gone, leaves fifty. Housman even keeps the bookkeeper’s phrasing: “It only leaves me fifty more” is the language of a bank balance, not a lyric poem. The strangeness is who is doing the counting. A twenty-year-old has no business auditing his life like this; at that age most people behave as though the supply were endless. This speaker has already drawn a line under the column and totalled it. And the figure he lands on, fifty springs, sounds like plenty to anyone reading. The poem disagrees and calls it “little room,” measuring time as if it were floor space, a cramped allowance to move around in. The tone never tips into self-pity. It stays flat, exact, faintly wry, which is exactly what makes it land.
Bloom to Snow
Here is the best move in the poem, and it is almost invisible. In the first stanza the cherry “is hung with bloom.” In the last line it is “hung with snow.” Same verb, same tree, one word changed. On the surface it is plain description, since cherry blossom genuinely does look like drifts of snow. But snow belongs to winter, the season the poem never names and does not have to, because by the final line it is already sitting inside the spring picture. The white of Eastertide blossom and the white of the dead months become the same white. In four words Housman folds the far end of the year into its beginning, and never says so out loud. The verb “hung” holds steady through both: bloom is hung on the tree like something on display, and by the close the word carries a little more weight than it did at the start.
The Smallest Possible Carpe Diem
The poem belongs to the carpe diem tradition and then quietly shrinks it. Herrick told the virgins to gather rosebuds while they may; Marvell’s lovers tore their pleasures through the iron gates of life. Housman’s grand answer to death is to go for more walks. “About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow,” and that is the whole resolution. No wild living, no last great passion, just attention, repeated as often as the years allow. It would be easy to read this as an anticlimax, and the poem takes that risk on purpose. Its wager is that looking hard at one beautiful thing, again and again, while you still can, is a serious enough reply to mortality. Housman states it plainly and declines to argue the case. The reader can decide whether that is wisdom or resignation; the poem is content to leave the question open.
Form and Technique
Three quatrains, iambic tetrameter, rhymed in couplets. The couplet is the tightest closing unit English has: each pair snaps shut on its rhyme and stops. Housman picked the most closed form available for a poem about a closed, finite quantity, and the shape of the stanzas keeps enacting the thing the words are worried about. The rhymes themselves are deliberately plain, mostly single syllables: now and bough, ten and again, go and snow. This is a man who read Latin verse for a living and could have written anything; he chose the simplest music on the shelf, because a young countryman doing sums about his own death should not sound ornate.
Each stanza does exactly one job. The first looks at the tree, the second counts the years, the third resolves to come back. The metre walks at the pace of the woodland stroll the speaker promises himself, four steady beats to a line, nothing hurried. If anything in the poem risks feeling contrived, it is the arithmetic of the middle stanza, which can strike a first-time reader as a little too neat. It survives because the voice around it never sells the feeling; the sum is allowed to be just a sum, and the emotion stays in the margins where Housman keeps it.
Notable Lines
Two lines carry the poem. The first is the one that should not work and does:
It only leaves me fifty more.
Line 8
It is flat accountancy, and dropped into a lyric about cherry blossom it becomes the most honest line in the poem. The second is the close:
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Line 12
One swapped noun, and spring and winter are standing in the same place.
Glossary
Three words do more work than they look like they do.
ride (line 3): a track or cleared path through woodland, made for riding or walking. Not a journey: a woodland ride is the path itself.
threescore years and ten (line 5): seventy years. A score is twenty, so threescore is sixty, plus ten. The phrase comes from Psalm 90, where it stands as the conventional span of a human life.
score (line 6): twenty. “Take from seventy springs a score” means subtract twenty: the line is doing its arithmetic in words.
Related Poems
Three poems that talk to this one:
- To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick: the carpe diem ancestor Housman is answering, all urgency and gathered rosebuds where Housman offers only a quiet walk.
- Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins: another short lyric where a young person meets death through a tree, and where the falling leaves turn out to be about the watcher all along.
- To an Athlete Dying Young by A. E. Housman: from the same volume, the companion argument that the smart thing is to catch the beautiful moment before time can take it away.