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Poetry

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

A. E. Housman published 1896 403 characters easy

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.

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Cover tile for Loveliest of trees, the cherry now by A. E. Housman, 1896
Loveliest of trees, the cherry nowA. E. Housman, published 1896403 charactersRead the full text at the publisher
About this text

A. E. Housman published A Shropshire Lad in 1896 at his own expense, after publishers turned it down. The book holds 63 short poems and this one is the second in the sequence. Housman worked as a professor of Latin and treated his poetry as separate from that career. Wikisource carries the collection poem by poem.

What it trainsThe second stanza counts in words rather than figures, so the passage mixes arithmetic with steady comma work.

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