Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Housman published A Shropshire Lad in 1896 at his own expense, after publishers had turned it down, and the book holds sixty-three short poems. 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.

Where this text comes fromThe copy linked below is a 1906 printing, ten years after the edition Housman paid for himself, by which point the book no longer needed his money to stay in print. In that edition the poem carries no title of its own. It is numbered within the sequence, and the name everyone uses for it, Loveliest of trees, is simply its first line pressed into service. You are copying the whole of it: three stanzas, twelve lines, from the cherry in bloom to the cherry hung with snow, with the arithmetic of a life folded into the middle four lines.

What you might not noticeThe book is signed A. E. Housman, but the collection is headed here with the full name, Alfred Edward Housman. Source

What it trainsThis passage does arithmetic without ever touching the number row. Threescore, ten, twenty, seventy, score and fifty are all spelled out, so the fingers stay on the letter rows while the mind runs a subtraction, and that split is exactly what trips people, because the eye starts checking the sum instead of the spelling. The punctuation is the plainest of the three poems here: seven commas and three full stops in 403 characters, nothing else at all. Two words reach ten letters, Eastertide and threescore, and both are single unbroken runs with no hyphen to give the hand a pause. Nine of the fourteen capitals open a verse line rather than a sentence.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource