In this poem, Housman's trademark melancholy is present in a more subdued or ambiguous form than is typical of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, but it is still the dominant mood.

The lines that indicate how long the speaker's life will last are these:

Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy years a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

It was traditionally believed, based on the Old Testament, that the normal life expectancy for humans is the alluded to "three score years and ten": that is, seventy years, given that a score is twenty years. When the speaker says of his or her "springs" that "twenty will not come again," this indicates a current age of twenty, so that fifty more years of life remain. The emphasis is therefore on how short a life-span this is:

to look at things in bloom,
Fifty years are little room ...

Two things are profoundly ironic about this poem. First, it is unusual and unexpected to find snow still lingering on the tree branches as late as Easter. As beautiful as the sight is, the imagery is nevertheless that of the cold winter and of the trees wearing white like a shroud. A second irony is that the speaker, though apparently joyful at seeing the cherry trees, is already contemplating death and the fact that all of this will come to an end. This is not generally the way young people think. When one is twenty, the illusion that "this life" will go on forever is strong; the awareness of the inevitability of dying, though everyone of course knows how real it is, usually hasn't sunk in at this point. So a melancholy picture emerges from the poem, in which the positive image of the beauty of nature is merely a backdrop for regret over the shortness of a life for which we are thought to be granted the proverbial "three score and ten."