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.

These lines are from A. E. Housman’s lyric “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,” a poem in his first collection, *A Shropshire Lad* (1896). Written in the voice of a young speaker who calculates his remaining “springs,” the poem reflects late-Victorian preoccupations with mortality and the fleetingness of beauty. Housman (1859–1936), a classical scholar and poet, often paired pastoral English landscapes with stoic, elegiac meditations on time and loss. The poem’s setting—woodlands in spring, cherry trees in blossom—serves as a vivid seasonal emblem against which the speaker measures the brevity of a human life.

The speaker performs a simple arithmetic of life expectancy (“threescore years and ten”) to make mortality emotionally immediate: even a full lifespan contains only a limited number of springs. By subtracting the years already lived, he reframes youth not as abundance but as a dwindling remainder, urging deliberate attention to transient beauty. The cherry “hung with snow” (blossom likened to snowfall) intensifies the sense of fragile, momentary splendor. The poem’s significance lies in its calm, practical carpe diem: not reckless indulgence, but a resolve to seek out and savor what is most perishable while time still allows.

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.