Summary
“When I Was One-and-Twenty” is made up of two eight-line stanzas, both structured around a piece of advice. The first begins with the speaker introducing himself. He recalls that when he was twenty-one, a wise man told him to give away money, rather than his heart. Indeed, the man said, it would be less costly to give up precious gemstones than his affection. However, the speaker was only twenty-one, and his youthful pride prevented him from listening to this good advice.
The second stanza continues in a similar vein. The speaker remembers more words he heard from the wise man when he was twenty-one. He said that the heart could never be given without a price. Even if it seems less costly than the riches described in the first stanza, in reality it will always be paid for with sadness and regret. Now that the speaker is one year older, he recognizes the truth of the wise man’s words.
Analysis
In “When I Was One-and-Twenty,” Housman pokes fun at the self-seriousness of young love. The speaker is a young man. Like many of Housman’s speakers in A Shropshire Lad, we can assume he’s a simple boy from the countryside. Although the speaker never identifies himself as such, this is implied by the poem's sing-song rhythm, which makes it feel old-fashioned. The “wise man” also speaks in a somewhat old-fashioned dialect, employing words like “’tis” and “rue.”
It’s important to note here that the old-fashioned and simple version of rural life presented by Housman in “When I Was One-and-Twenty” and many of the other poems in A Shropshire Lad doesn't reflect the reality of country life. Housman himself was not even from Shropshire, and the people who inhabited the English countryside naturally had the same capacity for cynicism, intelligence, and cruelty as their urban counterparts. Instead, when we say rural in relationship to Housman’s writing, what we really mean is an urban fantasy of rural life.
You might have heard the term “pastoral.” It refers to poetry that presents an idealized view of the countryside, often from the perspective of suspiciously poetical shepherds. Housman is writing in this tradition. However, he’s removed the typical descriptions of the beauty of the countryside, instead focusing on the pastoral speaker himself—particularly his youth and innocence. Pastoral poetry was written for an urban audience that felt nostalgic for what they imagined as the simplicity and ease of life in the countryside. The contemporary “cottagecore” trend is actually a pretty good parallel—people aren’t romanticizing the reality of life on a farm, but instead are attracted to an imagined rural aesthetic, and the fantasy of an easier life.
Perhaps surprisingly, the notoriously unsentimental Housman wasn’t usually critical of this tendency. In fact, many of the poems in A Shropshire Lad embrace the pastoral form wholeheartedly. One explanation might be that Housman found it freeing to speak from a different perspective. In his regular life, Housman was a famously combative academic who studied extremely dry material and rejected any more emotional or subjective readings of texts. In contrast, his poetry tends to be highly emotional. He felt that good poetry should aim to transfer the author’s feelings to the reader, rather than trying to convey any particular idea.
We can see a typical Housman poem at the center of “When I Was One-and-Twenty.” However, Housman also reveals his own more cynical perspective, which surrounds the young man’s account, and encourages the reader to see the poem as more complicated than what the speaker says explicitly.
The irony of “When I Was One-and-Twenty” emerges most obviously from the speaker’s lack of self-awareness when it comes to his youth. In the first line, the speaker establishes that he is remembering something that happened to him in the past. When he was only twenty-one, he had a fateful conversation with an older man. As readers, we thus assume that the speaker is now significantly older, because there are so many poems and novels in which an old man looks back on his youth.
The end of the first stanza further emphasizes the speaker’s youthful past, and the difference between himself then and now. He writes “I was one-and-twenty, / No use to talk to me.” He’s suggesting that young people are pig-headed and over-confident, and so there’s no use trying to give them advice. Based on this declaration, we assume that the speaker is now much older, and sees himself as completely different from his younger self.
However, in the final lines, the speaker reveals that he is now only twenty-two years old. We suddenly realize that the youthful naivety of the speaker when he was twenty-one actually extends to his attitude now, as he narrates the poem. He doesn’t recognize how young he still is, nor does he see how recently he was the foolish young man who couldn’t listen to advice.
Oddly, the irony of the poem actually makes it slightly more optimistic than if we took it at face value. The speaker’s attitude towards love is bleak. He sees it as necessarily a bad thing which eventually ends in woe and sadness. The wise man’s attitude towards love is even more cynical, because he presents it as an economic transaction. In the first stanza, he compares the heart to “crowns and pounds and guineas” (various types of English currency).
It can be a little harder to follow his argument in the second stanza. By saying the heart “was never given in vain,” he means that the heart was always given in exchange for something else. However, that something else is always a bad thing: “sighs” or “endless rue.” The speaker thus takes what seems like a positive reading of love, “The heart…was never given in vain” and gives it a cynical, negative twist. Rather than declaring that love is always worth it even when it hurts, he’s presenting love as merely an object given as part of a market that always ends up harming the lover.
Given all that negativity, Housman’s ironic stance towards the speaker enables a more positive view of love. The speaker sees his youthful optimism as the problem, and believes he is more mature for now recognizing how costly love is. Yet Housman reminds us that in reality, the speaker is still young and inexperienced. After all, how can he, at 22, be sure that his grief will be “endless,” any more than he could know, at 21, that love would be a source of joy? Now, he believes the man who speaks ill of love is “wise,” but really, that isn’t any more reliable of an assessment than his conclusion, one year ago, that the man wasn’t worth listening to.
By teasing the young man for his naivety, Housman invites the reader to adopt a more complex view of love. Certainly, the young man was foolish if he once believed love could never lead him to grief, and his experience has proved that to him. Yet he also ends up looking a little silly for adopting the opposite extreme, and convincing himself that love is always a bad deal. The fact that the so-called wise man's transactional version of love is so appealing to this simple young man should make us dubious of it.
One potential message of the poem, then, is that cynicism is not necessarily any wiser than optimistic innocence. Although bitter pessimism can make someone appear more mature, in reality it can correspond to a deeply shallow understanding of how the world, and here, specifically love, works. We can leave the poem knowing that love is more than a transaction, and hoping that the young man will eventually realize the same thing.
