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"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" is a lyric poem by the English Latin scholar and poet A. E. Housman. Originally written in 1895, it was first published as the second poem in his collection A Shropshire Lad, where it appeared under the Roman numeral II, but without other title. It is usually referred to by its first line. Its theme, voiced by a young man contemplating cherry blossom, is the transitoriness of life and beauty, and the need to enjoy them while they last. It is probably Housman's best-known poem, and one of the most anthologized of English lyrics. Its opening line has become a part of the language, "inextricably lodged in the public mind and vocabulary". In a 1995 poll it was chosen as one of the British people's 100 favourite poems. It has been set to music over 60 times.

Text

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.

Composition

The original draft of the poem, the manuscript of which still survives, has been dated to April or May 1895. This first version consists of only two stanzas reading as follows:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodlands wide
Wearing snow for Eastertide.

And since to look at things you love
Fifty times is not enough
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

The middle stanza was composed later, and reached its present state only after much rewriting. "Loveliest of trees" was first published, without title, as the second poem in his collection A Shropshire Lad (1896).

Metre

The poem consists of three four-line stanzas in rhyming couplets. With one exception the lines are iambic tetrameters, but this metre is disrupted by the first word, Loveliest.

Themes

In common with several other of the Shropshire Lad poems, including "Bredon Hill" and "Is my team ploughing", "Loveliest of trees" is a poem dealing with the English seasons. It also presents a young, naïve and innocent man's realization of his own mortality seen through the analogy of the short-lived blossom of the typical – rather than of any individual – cherry tree. This melancholy theme is relieved by the message that beauty is to be enjoyed while it can be; that it is indeed their very evanescence that make the cherry blossoms and life as a whole so valuable, and that ageing and death are just as important as youth and beauty in making the complete life in all its richness.

Housman chose as his symbol of transient beauty a subject close to his heart. The gardens of Housman's childhood home boasted a locally famous cherry tree; for several years in the 1890s he recorded in his diary the flowering of cherry trees; and in his latter years he was responsible for the planting of an avenue of cherry trees at his college.

Analogues and sources

The "threescore years and ten" of the poem allude to Psalms 90:10, "The days of our years are threescore years and ten". Other verbal and thematic sources of the poem have been suggested in lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Andrew Lang's "The Last Maying", Robert Louis Stevenson's Underwoods, and Robert Bridges' "Spring Goeth All in White".

Reception

"Loveliest of trees" was from the first judged by critics to be one of A Shropshire Lad's best poems. Hubert Bland, reviewing that volume in The New Age, wrote of the "per simplicity Mr Housman has given it with the swift, unfaltering touch of a master's hand". John Bell Henneman, in another review of the same book, singled it out for high praise. The enthusiasm continued in the inter-war years. Iolo Aneurin Williams thought that "The loveliness of the English spring has perhaps never been put more feelingly, more exquisitely". Charles Williams considered it as exquisite a nature-poem as any in English. Nevile Watts instanced it as one of the Housman poems which, save for their lack of "magic", show him to have been worthy of "a seat beside the two greatest of our lyrists – Shakespeare and Blake". Louis Untermeyer believed it to be arguably the finest lyric in the language. One dissenting voice came from Edith Sitwell, who thought it exemplified Housman's lack of any "gift for illuminating or transmuting things seen. What add to our experience? Nothing." Many more recent critics have been similarly dismissive, Benjamin T. Fisher noting in 2000 that from "some recent critiques of 'Loveliest of trees'...we might come away thinking how, in reality, this is one of the veriest bits of versified trash, in theme and technique, that has ever masqueraded as poetry". Peter Edgerly Firchow, for example, considered it a failure, the second stanza being too convoluted and verbose to perform its pivotal role in the poem, and nature being presented in too abstract a form. Terence Allan Hoagwood, on the other hand, praised the "complexity of feeling that is remarkable given the simple (and few) words that Housman has used", and D. T. Siebert called it "a little masterpiece of carpe diem". Its popularity with readers is much more clear-cut. In 1995, in a poll conducted by the BBC, it was selected as one of the British nation's 100 favourite poems.

Musical settings

No book of verse since the time of Shakespeare has been turned to by English songwriters so often as A Shropshire Lad, and of the poems contained therein "Loveliest of trees" is one of the most frequently set, over 60 such songs and choral works being known. These include settings by

In addition, Butterworth used his setting of the poem as the basis of his orchestral rhapsody A Shropshire Lad.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Matthews 2025.
  2. Hanley, Evelyn A. (1972). Nature in Theme and Symbol: Wordsworth to Eliot. New York: Heath Cote. p. 52. Retrieved 18 January 2025.
  3. Winterowd, W. Ross (1975). The Contemporary Writer: A Practical Rhetoric. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. p. 192. ISBN 9780155137240. Retrieved 18 January 2025.
  4. Briggs, Anthony (2013). "The Similar Lives and Different Destinies of Thomas Gray, Edward FitzGerald and A. E. Housman". In Poole, Adrian; van Ruymbeke, Christine; Martin, William H.; Mason, Sandra (eds.). FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Popularity and Neglect. London: Anthem Press. p. 75. ISBN 9781783080717. Retrieved 18 January 2025.
  5. Hoagwood 1995, p. 114.
  6. Pitts, Gordon (Autumn 1967). "Review of The Making of A Shropshire Lad: A Manuscript Variorum, by Tom Burns Haber". Victorian Poetry. 5 (3): 233–234. JSTOR 40001415.
  7. ^ Firchow 2002, p. 18.
  8. ^ Ezust 2003.
  9. "Loveliest of trees". The Housman Society. Retrieved 19 January 2025.
  10. Hoagwood 1995, p. 67.
  11. Leggett, B. J. (1978). The Poetic Art of A. E. Housman: Theory and Practice. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. p. 47. ISBN 9780803209695. Retrieved 19 January 2025.
  12. Blumenfeld, Robert (2006). Tools and Techniques for Character Interpretation: A Handbook of Psychology for Actors, Writers, and Directors. Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight. p. 302. ISBN 9780879103262. Retrieved 19 January 2025.
  13. ^ Siebert 2013, p. 86.
  14. Tiempo, Edilberto K.; Bernad, Miguel A.; Tiempo, Edith L. (1999). Introduction to Literature, Fiction, Poetry, Drama. Manila: Rex. p. 308. ISBN 9712322904. Retrieved 19 January 2024.
  15. ^ Burnett 1997, p. 321.
  16. Gardner 1992, p. 60.
  17. ^ Fisher 2000, p. 32.
  18. Gardner 1992, p. 210.
  19. Gardner 1992, p. 227.
  20. Gardner 1992, p. 353.
  21. Gardner 1992, p. 261.
  22. Hoagwood 1995, p. 32.
  23. Jones, Griff Rhys, ed. (1996). The Nation's Favourite Poems. London: BBC. pp. 5, 133. ISBN 9780563387824. Retrieved 19 January 2025.
  24. Hold, Trevor (2000). "'Flowers to Fair': A Shropshire Lad 's Legacy of Song". In Holden, Alan W.; Birch, J. Roy (eds.). A. E. Housman: A Reassessment. Basingstoke: Macmillan. p. 106. ISBN 9781349622818. Retrieved 19 January 2025.
  25. "A Shakespeare sonnet sequence: Sounds and sweet airs; Sonnets to sundry notes of music / music by Roger Harris". Library Hub Discover. Retrieved 20 January 2025.
  26. "Loveliest of trees: for SSAATTBB choir / Mark David Boden". Library Hub Discover. Retrieved 20 January 2025.
  27. "Loveliest of trees: SATB choir and piano / Valerie Showers Crescenz". Library Hub Discover. Retrieved 20 January 2025.
  28. Scowcroft, Philip. "Chorus Master and Composer: Leslie Woodgate". MusicWeb International. Retrieved 20 January 2025.
  29. Whittingham, Kevin Robert (2008). A Shropshire Lad in British Music Since 1940: Decline and Renewal (DLitt et Phil thesis). University of South Africa. p. 407. Retrieved 20 January 2025.
  30. "Song of a young man .- Loveliest of trees, the cherry now". Musica (in French). 2024. Retrieved 21 January 2025.
  31. "Concert Repertoire". Harlequin Chamber Choir. Retrieved 21 January 2025.
  32. Dibble, Jeremy (2020). "Narrative and Formal Plasticity in the British Symphonic Poem, 1850–1950". In Allis, Michael; Watt, Paul (eds.). The Symphonic Poem in Britain, 1850–1950. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. p. 43. ISBN 9781787448414. Retrieved 21 January 2025.

References

External links

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