Discussion Topic
The poet's age in "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" by A. E. Housman
Summary:
The poet in "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" by A. E. Housman is twenty years old. In the poem, he reflects on the brevity of life and the importance of appreciating beauty while he is still young, as he calculates that he only has fifty more years to enjoy the cherry blossoms.
What is the speaker's age in "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" by A. E. Housman?
The speaker of this poem is twenty years old.
He reveals his age in the second stanza:
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.
Recall that a "score" of anything is twenty of them. Remember Abraham Lincoln's mention of "four score and seven years ago" in his Gettysburg Address? He meant "eighty-seven years ago." However many scores you have, just multiply that by twenty, and add the rest: (4 x 20) + 7 = 87.
Getting back to the poem, what this second stanza means is, "Of the total seventy years that I'll probably get to be alive, I'll never again be twenty like I am now. So if you subtract twenty from seventy, I've only got fifty more years to enjoy life!" (Saying "threescore years and ten" is saying "seventy years:"...
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[3 x 20] + 10 = 70.)
It's really important to read that whole stanza when you're trying to figure out how old the speaker of the poem is. If you stopped after reading the first two lines of the stanza, you might think that the speaker is seventy instead of twenty--you might misinterpret the first two lines as "Now since I'm seventy, I'll never again be twenty." But after you read all four of those lines, you understand that the first two lines are actually saying, "Now, since I probably only get seventy years of life, my current age of twenty is never going to happen again."
You might have guessed that, instead of someone who's barely out of his teens, it's more likely that an older gentleman of seventy would be out walking, looking at beautiful trees and thinking about how life is so short and valuable. But the speaker of this poem is actually a twenty-year-old doing just that!
What is the poet's current and past age in "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now"?
In A. E. Housman’s poem “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now,” the narrator is 20 years old at the time of narration. There is no earlier age given.
There are three numbers mentioned in this poem, but only one of them is actually an age that the narrator is or has been. The three numbers are 70 (also stated as threescore and ten), 20, and 50. The narrator says
Now, of my threescore years and ten, / Twenty will not come again,
Please note, however, that this does not mean that the narrator is now 70 years old. When he (presumably, though there is nothing to indicate the sex of the narrator other than that Housman was male) says this, he is alluding to the biblical saying that human beings are given 70 years of life. So “my threescore years and ten” refers to the 70 years that he is expected to live. Of those 70 years, “twenty will not come again,” meaning that he has lived 20 years.
The poem then refers to 50 springs. If the narrator has 70 years of life and has lived 20 of them, he has 50 years left. All of this goes to show that the narrator’s “present age” is 20 years old and there is no “earlier one.”
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