Poem of the Day: ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) had a talent — perhaps the greatest in the history of English poetry — for making difficult verse look simple, as the Sun pointed out when Housman’s “When I Was One-and-Twenty” was a Poem of the Day in March and “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” in July. One of Housman’s best-known poems, “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” is yet another example. It may start as a spring poem, the cherry trees in bloom, “Wearing white for Eastertide.” Yet a mention of time and aging in the second of the tetrameter quatrains turns the poem into winter verses. Because the narrator will live at best another fifty years, the cherry trees in spring are not enough — and so “About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow.” That’s a fairly complex thought, but Housman, as always, makes it seem easy.