Alfred Edward Housman

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

Eastertide timing

Cherry blossoms peak in early April in England—exactly Easter season. The white blooms double as resurrection imagery.

Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Psalm 90 reference

"Threescore years and ten" comes from Psalm 90:10—the biblical human lifespan of seventy years. He's doing mortality math.

Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,

Springs, not years

He counts in springs (bloom seasons) rather than years. Each missed spring is a permanent loss of beauty, not just time.

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.

Double meaning

"Hung with snow" describes both the white blossoms now and the actual snow that will cover these trees after he's dead.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Math of Mortality

Housman published this in *A Shropshire Lad* (1896) at age 37, but the speaker claims to be 20. The threescore years and ten comes from Psalm 90:10: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow." He's using the Bible's official lifespan estimate.

The arithmetic is deliberate: 70 years minus 20 lived equals 50 remaining. But notice he converts everything to springs—not years, not days, but bloom seasons. This isn't abstract time passing; it's fifty chances to see cherry blossoms. Each spring you miss is gone permanently. The scarcity is specific and visual.

The poem's logic is almost comic in its precision: "I'm 20, I'll probably live to 70, that's 50 springs left, that's not many, so I'd better go look at trees right now." But the joke has teeth. Housman knew his classics—he was a Latin professor—and the carpe diem tradition always counted time to create urgency. He's just making the count brutally explicit.

What Housman Knew at 37

When Housman wrote this, he was a closeted gay classicist living in Victorian England, working as a patent office clerk after failing his Oxford finals (he'd later become one of England's greatest Latin scholars). *A Shropshire Lad* sold poorly at first but became a bestseller during WWI—soldiers carried it in the trenches because it spoke plainly about death and beauty.

The Eastertide reference isn't just seasonal. Easter means resurrection, but these blossoms last two weeks maximum. The "white" is both bridal (pure, celebratory) and funeral (shroud, snow, death). Housman builds the poem's contradiction into a single image: the trees are dressed for both a wedding and a burial.

The final line—"cherry hung with snow"—works three ways: it describes the white blossoms now, anticipates real snow on bare branches in winter, and suggests the trees covered in snow after the speaker is dead. It's the same tree in three different times, and the speaker will only witness one or two of those versions. The poem's entire argument is: beauty is seasonal, you are temporary, pay attention now.