Date: 24 April 2009 17:04:42
The weather has been delightfully glorious of late here in my corner of the world.
The cherry blossom is absolutely delightful - and put me in mind of this poem. I always associate Autumn with a certain amount of melancholy but this poem also evokes it for me - particularly as I first read it when I was 14 or 15 - and thought that age 20 was really quite grown up and "old". Now that I have passed by the half way mark of my "three score years and ten", it seems a little sad that even Spring shows that time is slipping by. Oh dear! This was not supposed to be maudlin - it was supposed to be a celebration of something lovely.
The Cherry Tree - by A E Housman
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 years are little room,
About the woodland I will go,
To see the cherry hung with snow.