When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, "Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free." But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again, "The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; 'Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue." And I am two-and-twenty, And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.
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Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines
Glossary · In Popular Culture · Related Poems
Summary
The speaker remembers being twenty-one, when an older and wiser man warned him to give away anything — money, jewels — but never his heart, and to keep his affections free. At twenty-one, the speaker brushed the advice aside. A year later, now twenty-two and plainly nursing a broken heart, he admits the wise man was right all along: a heart freely given is repaid in sighs and endless regret.
Background
“When I Was One-and-Twenty” is Poem XIII of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, the 1896 collection that made his name. Housman was by profession a distinguished classical scholar — later Professor of Latin at Cambridge — and he published the sixty-three poems with his own financial help. The book grew slowly into one of the best-loved volumes of English verse, its mood of rural nostalgia, lost youth, and stoic melancholy resonating powerfully, especially during the First World War. Like most poems in the collection, this one is untitled in the original and is known by its first line.
The poem is spoken by a young man of twenty-two looking back on advice he ignored at twenty-one. Housman was firm that the speaker was male: when an illustrated edition pictured the speaker as a woman, he remarked drily, “How like an artist to think that the speaker is a woman!” Later readers, aware of Housman’s lifelong and unrequited love for his fellow student Moses Jackson, have heard a more personal ache beneath the poem’s light, proverbial surface.
Analysis and Themes
The poem turns on a single rueful joke: the gap between being told a truth and learning it for oneself. Its two stanzas stage that lesson as a before and after, separated by just one year.
The Wise Man’s Warning
In the first stanza, the “wise man” offers advice in the shape of folk wisdom: part with crowns, pounds, guineas, pearls, and rubies if you must, but never give your heart away — “keep your fancy free.” The young speaker, secure in being “one-and-twenty,” dismisses him outright: “No use to talk to me.” Youth, the poem suggests, cannot be warned; it has to find out for itself.
Wealth Versus the Heart
The wise man’s catalogue of riches makes the poem’s central comparison. Crowns, pounds, and guineas can be handed over safely because they can be replaced; the heart cannot. By setting the priceless heart against mere money and jewels, Housman quietly insists that the most valuable thing a person owns is also the most dangerous to spend.
The Lesson Learned Too Late
The second stanza repeats the setup — “When I was one-and-twenty / I heard him say again” — but now the speaker has lived the consequence. The heart, once given, “Was never given in vain,” yet it is “paid with sighs a plenty / And sold for endless rue.” The closing lines collapse the whole argument into a sigh: “And I am two-and-twenty, / And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.” A single year has turned a dismissed warning into hard-won knowledge.
Form and Technique
The poem is built from two eight-line stanzas in brisk iambic trimeter — three beats to a line — that give it the lilt of a folk song. Only the even lines rhyme (say/away, free/me; again/vain, rue/true), while the odd lines, including the repeated “When I was one-and-twenty,” go unrhymed, lending the verse a loose, spoken ease. The cadence is so song-like that the poem has drawn composers to it ever since.
Housman’s tools are repetition and restraint. The refrain “When I was one-and-twenty” and the echoed “I heard him say” frame both stanzas, underscoring the cyclical idea that every generation relearns the same lesson. The diction is deliberately plain, almost proverbial, and the emotion is held back until the very last line, where the doubled “’tis true, ’tis true” lets a year’s worth of regret slip out in a single breath.
Notable Lines
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas / But not your heart away” — The wise man’s central warning, weighing replaceable wealth against the irreplaceable heart.
“‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty / And sold for endless rue.” — Love’s true cost, stated as plainly as a proverb.
“And I am two-and-twenty, / And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.” — The rueful close, in which one repeated phrase carries the whole weight of experience.
Glossary
A few of the poem’s words and coins may be unfamiliar.
one-and-twenty / two-and-twenty — Older ways of saying twenty-one and twenty-two.
crowns, pounds, guineas — British money; a crown was five shillings and a guinea twenty-one — here, symbols of replaceable wealth.
fancy — Affection or romantic inclination; “keep your fancy free” means stay unattached, don’t fall in love.
rue — Bitter regret or sorrow; also the name of a bitter herb long associated with repentance.
‘Tis — A poetic contraction of “it is.”
a plenty — In abundance; “sighs a plenty” means plenty of sighs.
In Popular Culture
George Butterworth set the poem as the second song in his Six Songs from “A Shropshire Lad” (1911) — the one piece in that cycle where he wedded Housman’s words to an actual folk tune, matching the poem’s balladic lilt. It remains the most frequently performed musical version.
It was also among the first poems from A Shropshire Lad to be set to music, by Arthur Somervell in 1904, and was later set by Ivor Gurney in his song cycle Ludlow and Teme (1919).
Related Poems
- Loveliest of Trees by A. E. Housman: A companion piece from A Shropshire Lad, weighing youth’s brevity against the beauty of the passing moment.
- With Rue My Heart Is Laden by A. E. Housman: Another brief Housman lyric of loss and remembered friends, sharing this poem’s word “rue.”
- To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick: An earlier carpe diem warning to seize youth and love before they slip away.
- When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats: Love looked back on across the years, and the quiet ache of love refused.
- Remember by Christina Rossetti: A gentle sonnet on love, memory, and letting go.