Artist of the Day - Day 1 - A. E. Housman

A. E. Housman,  Poet

A.E. Housman is one of my favorite English poets.  His work is simple in its prose but very thought provoking.  One of my favorite poems (from any poet) is from Housman, it is called: Loveliest of Trees, The Cherry Now, from the “A Shropshire Lad” collection.


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 three score 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.


This poem always instills in me a since of how time is passing and that we all have only so much time and much of it isn’t used very well.  That sometimes, we just need to take a break, realized that things are finite and we need to take a moment to “see the cherry hung with snow.” (or whatever other metaphor you’d like to use).


(A bit of additional information stolen from Wikipedia)

Alfred Edward Housman, usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before 1900. Their wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and distinctive imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian  and Edwardian taste, and to many early twentieth century English composers (beginning with Arthur Somervell) both before and after the First World War.