When I Was One-and-Twenty Essay Questions

How does “When I Was One-and-Twenty” engage with the pastoral tradition?

Poetry in the pastoral tradition depicts country life as idyllic and often characterizes rural speakers as simple, innocent, and wholesome. Housman’s most famous book, A Shropshire Lad, which is set in the countryside and written largely from an imagined rural perspective, comes right out of the pastoral tradition. The old-fashioned vocabulary and sing-song style of “When I Was One-and-Twenty” replicates pastoral tropes. However, the poem’s ironic ending also invokes the parallel tradition of parodying the sentimentality of pastoral poetry.

Discuss one moment where “When I Was One-and-Twenty” subverts the reader’s expectations.

In the second stanza of “When I Was One-and-Twenty,” the speaker quotes the wise man as saying “the heart out of the bosom / was never given in vain.” The old-fashioned word “bosom,” and the use of the phrase “in vain,” make us expect a romantic declaration and a defense of the value of love, even when it is painful. Yet instead, the wise man uses “in vain” in a purely literal sense, to mean that the heart is always given in exchange for something else. That something else, it turns out, is “sighs a plenty” and “endless rue.” By subverting our expectations, he makes us feel the disappointment of love more strongly.