But Housman makes a good point, enjoy things while you can, I shall re read your blog when I have sent this and see how long he was able to enjoy the blossom. Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address. Interesting Literature is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by linking to Amazon.
Share this: Tweet. Like this: Like Loading Jeanie Buckingham September 16, at pm. I know — needs must when it comes to finding copyright-free images : Loading Once more, a marvellous analysis — thank you: Loading Glad you liked it, Sarah — thank you! Subscribe via Email Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new posts by email.
Interesting Literature. 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.
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! 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.
The word "hung" is also associated with death. Use of this image, then, could be seen as a metaphor for human mortality. Lines Here, Housman paints the reader a verbal picture or image of the many cherry trees in their white blooms. The third line creates a picture of the various cherry trees "standing" in the woodland "ride. The fourth line uses the word "Eastertide" to describe the cherry trees' white blossoms.
Thus, while evoking associations of spring and the renewal of natural life, it brings, when viewed in conjunction with the word "now" in the first line, and "hung" in the second line, perhaps offers the reader more strongly the concept of the ephemeral, or briefness, of life before death ends it.
Lines This section of the poem establishes that speaker of the poem is twenty years old, and that he believes his life span to be about seventy years, which leaves him only fifty more spring seasons.
The strongly positioned "now" at the beginning of line 5 can be interpreted as working in parallel with the "now" at the end of line 1 to emphasize the sharp awareness of the briefness of this moment, the passing of time, and the shortness of human life.
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