“When I Was-and-Twenty” was published as part of A Shropshire Lad, Housman’s most famous collection of poems. Shropshire is a region in rural England, and Housman wrote the majority of his poems from the perspective of rural speakers, who tended to be youthful, innocent, and simple. His idealization of country life draws on a long tradition of so-called “pastoral” poetry, in which poets, often without any personal connection to the countryside, write about simple shepherds who live in harmony with nature.
The tradition dates back to the ancient Greeks, with the poet Theocritus, who wrote about the joys of rural life. It was more famously picked up by the Romans, where Virgil, best known for the Aeneid, also wrote the Eclogues, a series of poems set in the semi-mythical countryside of Arcadia.
Pastoral poetry was one of many poetic traditions revived in the Renaissance, as European artists and writers began returning to the works of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration. Perhaps the most iconic example of pastoral poetry from this period is Christopher Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” which begins,
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
The speaker is a shepherd, who attempts to lure his beloved to him with images of the beauty and pleasure of the countryside. Marlowe was a Londoner, and the poem caters to his fellow urbanites by providing an idyllic fantasy to escape into. Although the poem was extremely popular, it also became a frequent victim of parody. Marlowe’s contemporary Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a response from the shepherd’s beloved, in which she declares,
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy Love.But Time drives flocks from field to fold;
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold;
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward Winter reckoning yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.
Raleigh emphasizes that the countryside is no paradise: its men are still just as fallible, and its beauties are still subject to the ravages of time.
As a highly educated man, Housman was no doubt thinking of this whole long history when he wrote his own pastoral poetry. The appealing innocence of his rural speakers builds on the tradition of Marlowe’s famous poem. Yet, as Raleigh’s poem proves, the irony of “When I Was One-and-Twenty” is also right at home in the pastoral genre.
