Spring and Death

A poem of Housman’s which might seem, as we draw to its close, to be moving in a positive direction, but where the bubble of hope is pricked by the very last word, rather as Horace’s “nenia” deflates the ending of “Festo quid potius die,” is the second item in A Shropshire Lad:

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.¹