“When I Was One-and-Twenty” is a characteristically witty poem by the English poet and scholar A.E. Housman. Housman was born in 1859, and wrote most of his poetry in the late nineteenth century. Although today he is best known for his poetry, during his life he prioritized his studies as a classicist. As a scholar, Housman was infamously acerbic and confrontational. His research was extremely technical, focused on reconstructing classical texts as they might have existed when they were written rather than on interpreting their meanings. His poetry displays a very different side of his character.
In his collection A Shropshire Lad, the only poetry he sought to publish during his lifetime, Housman writes from the perspective of a naive country boy. In some poems, the lad observes the goings-on of the world around him, while in others, including “When I Was One-and-Twenty,” he speaks to his own experiences of love and loss. In the beginning, “When I Was One-and-Twenty” seems like a pretty conventional reminder of the perils of love, told from the perspective of a sympathetically simple rural speaker.
However, the poem ends by revealing that the world-weary speaker is in fact only twenty-two now. Rather than an old man looking back on the mistakes of his youth, we realize that we are listening to a still young man falsely distancing himself from his own recent past. The poem’s ironic tone is characteristic of Housman, and reminds us that the poet does not necessarily share the perspective of the simple country speaker.
