Poem of the Day: ‘When I Was One-and-Twenty’

For any reader or writer of poetry with a formalist bent, A.E. Housman (1859–1936) is the gold standard of modern verse. Like Philip Larkin, Housman (whose birthday is March 26) can be grim, sardonic, facile, and merciless. But he also makes formal verse look easy — and as every writer knows, simple is hard. Maybe the hardest of all things to do. In “When I Was One-and-Twenty,” Housman uses doubled quatrains in trimeter (a rarish beat, sometimes called “half meter,” that relies on the ear hearing the ghost of 4/3 ballad meter) to joke of the wisdom that descends between ages twenty-one and twenty-two.