Desert Island Poems: 'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now' by A. E. Housman

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A Shropshire Lad 2: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

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.

"The days of our years are threescore years and ten", or so it goes in Psalms 90:10, and it's this idea of the transitory nature of life which is at the heart of 'Loveliest of trees', one of Housman's most famous, and one of the nation's favourite poems. It's a carpe diem poem, if there were ever one. The poem features in his sequence A Shropshire Lad but is by far the most popular poem from that sequence, so let's break down why that might be.

The Opening Line

The opening line of this poem is perhaps one of the most well known in English poetry and there is something about its syntax and rhythm which makes it so. The poem is written in iambic tetrameter, lines of four stresses in an iambic pattern, which when in a poem that rhymes as it does here, always seems to put additional strain on those rhyming words. By this I mean it exposes the rhyme in a way that iambic pentameter does not, due to the relative brevity of its line. If managed badly this can make the poem really clunky and place too much prominence on the rhyming words, giving it a hackneyed feeling. One of the ways around this though is the use of enjambment to take the weight off this strain. By doing this the rhyming word becomes almost lost in the flow of the line, consumed within it and therefore the rhyme's importance becomes secondary to the sense of the sentence. Housman's poem is a prime example of this as we see the first quatrain, for example, as one full sentence with the rhyming words taking their place within it, subtly. The first line 'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now' is unusual in ending with 'now' and almost seems grammatically incorrect, but at the same time is syntactically intriguing. We also note Housman's avoidance of writing 'The loveliest of trees' beginning instead with 'Loveliest of trees...' which not only avoids repetition of 'the' within the opening line but also allows him to begin with the word 'Loveliest' which is quite the opening word, and gives us a direct, immediate insight into the poem's sentimentality and Romantic sensibility. If poetry is the best words in the best order then we should also note how Housman avoided the choice of plumping for 'The cherry now, loveliest of trees,' which not only messes up the rhyme scheme, and doesn't really scan that well but also seems to make even less sense than his final 'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now'. His final choice also allows him to end the line with 'now' which foregrounds the ideas of time and impermanence right from the off. The opening line, as I'd argue with most excellent poems, is an encapsulation of all of the poem's concerns: the beauty of nature and the passage of time. While critics may argue 'now' is primarily there to prop up the rhyme scheme between 'now' and 'bough' I'd argue it also conjures a sense of urgency which is felt as the speaker goes on to contemplate their own age and the years they have lost and will lose yet.

Where Do You Go From There?

But, after such an excellent (iconic, even) opening where do you go from there? Well, the answer for Housman is 'along the bough' as he zooms out, to use the language of cinematography, as he goes from 'bloom', to 'bough', to 'ride' (meaning a path of track) to 'Eastertide'. The fact the cherry tree is 'hung' with bloom and that it 'stands' 'wearing' white also seems significant. The word hung gives it a sense of ornamentation, in the way that we might hang decorations on a Christmas tree, while 'stands' and 'wearing' personify it to some degree, even if it's not being personified in an exactly energetic manner, as it 'stands', 'hung' with blossom and 'wearing' – these are largely quite passive actions. The sense of the boughs being 'hung' with blossom also suggest a sense of burden, that the trees are weighed down with the weight of blossom. So, perhaps on closer inspection this may not be the poem of praise and joy that we may have been programmed to assume from Housman, but one of quiet despair at the ageing process and its inescapability. For example, as opposed to nature being full of life and energy, an active presence, it's 'hung' with blossom and 'stands' (not just stands but 'stands about', as if waiting for something to happen) 'wearing' white like a child who's been dressed for church or a family occasion. Is there even something superficial, then, about it for Housman? An emptiness to this display of white? This sense, though, of an emptiness perhaps shouldn't be that surprising, particularly when we encounter what comes next in the poem.

Ageing

And what comes next in the poem is not quite a riddle but a mathematical conundrum in which the reader has to perform a little arithmetic to figure out exactly what age Housman is. He writes:

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.

It's not quite on the level of 'if a train leaves the station at 3pm travelling at 50mph, how long will it take to get to...?' but it's not far off. The first thing we notice is the repetition of 'Now' which we had in the first line. Poets usually go out of their way to avoid such repetition but for Housman he seems to have made a point of it. We could argue that the repetition of this temporal discourse marker emphasises and foregrounds this idea of the passage of time, with the elusive 'now' and also sets up a sense of parallel between Housman, the speaker, and the cherry tree. Like the tree Housman while blossoming in the youth that he has left, is burdened with a sense of time's passage, just as the cherry tree is burdened or 'hung with bloom along the bough'. He is 'wearing' his years just as the tree is 'wearing white'. We could also argue that this second quatrain with all its mathematics loses some of the lyricism of the first quatrain; it's a quatrain grounded in counting, in contrast to the first quatrain with its focus on natural and just more poetic imagery: blossom, bloom, bough, ride (an unsual but interesting choice of word to describe a path). In the second quatrain has Housman taken his foot off the poetic gas, or has he deliberately dropped such poeticisms to emphasise the suddenness and coldness of the epiphany of his ageing, and how his life is just a countdown in the face of such beauty? I'd say it's the former. Well, I hope it's the former.

The Sense of an Ending

And so to the ending, which we reach quickly, considering the brevity of the preceding lines of iambic tetrameter, and considering the second quatrain was largely one protracted mathematical equation. As for the ending, well, if you were looking for a major twist or something to throw you off, then I'm afraid you'll be disappointed, in a way. Not totally disappointed but disappointed, particularly considering that Housman simply repeats several of the words which have already cropped up in the poem. He writes:

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.

So, here he repeats 'bloom', 'fifty', 'woodlands', 'cherry', 'about', 'hung'. We might rightly ask ourselves in a poem of such limited vocabulary how it's come to achieve such national acclaim? Well, I suppose it's exactly because of the unchallenging nature of the language and imagery that we have taken it to our hearts, and perhaps that says more about the taste of the masses when it comes to poetry than any particular quality or master craftsmanship to these lines of Housman. To use the language of gastronomy, it's a highly palatable poem. If we were being harsh we could say it's the poetic equivalent to a McDonald's burger, soft and slips down easy. But, I think that would be unfair. And I think that such simplicity is hard to achieve in a poem, and it would also be to negate the lilting lyricism of the poem which is a quality in itself. When we start to dig a little deeper into this last quatrain there might be more going on than first meets the eye. He begins the verse with 'And' which is a sharp contrast to the poeticised language and imagery of the first stanza. The 'And' signals something more direct in the poet's address, a new sense of urgency, wanting to cut through the poetic language of the first stanza, and the mathematical logic of the second. I'd argue the sense and syntax strain a little with the first two lines with 'fifty springs are little room' - a very Victorian type of syntactical inversion, which carries on with the third line in how it begins 'about the woodlands I will go' instead of 'I will go about the woodlands'. It's worth noting that since the first verse he has pluralised the 'woodland' suggesting either a mistake on his part, or that he's widening his search to more woodlands, signalling that he's now filled with a new-found intensity to live his life and seize the day, in search of evermore cherry trees.

The Last Line

The last line of the poem offers a neat conclusion, which feels almost too neat. Some have criticised the poem's ditty-like, sing-song structure and there is definitely a sense of that in the last line, but I also feel that Housman's too clever to let that be the case, and in such simplicty there is more going on. I believe it's just too simple for us to take at face value. And indeed when we dig into the words we can see more going on. For me it all hinges on that last word 'snow'. Up to this point, Housman has given the word 'now' a prominent position in the opening line of both verses, however in this last one there is no 'now', but we do have 'snow' as if the moment has become 'snow' in a metaphor for transience and impermanence. The cherry is no longer hung with blossom but 'snow' - two very different things. The snow here is acting as a metaphor for the blossom, suggesting that it's as white and ephemeral. But how can blossom be snow? It might look like snow but it isn't. Does the metaphor really work here or does it break down in this last line? Yes, I think it does. Indeed there's something literally chilling about it. While the blossom is at the start, it's now snow, cold, melting, impermanent. In the space of twelve lines the speaker's melancholy has worsened, or deepened, to the point where he can hardly take any delight in the blossom due to his overwhelming feelings of mortality. 'Now' becomes 'snow' and all he can do is 'see' it, as opposed to actively participate or engage with the scene. The closing image is one of a detached observer passing through the woodlands desperately as his years dwindle.

Not to demean the tastes and intellect of the general public, but I suspect those who voted this as one of the nation's favourite poems might have rethought their vote if they were aware of the sense of despair which really lies at the heart of this famous Housman poem.