Love as Trade (Allegory)
Throughout the poem, the wise man compares love to trade. He treats the heart as a valuable commodity, specifically comparing it to coins and gemstones. These things are worth a lot in their own right (at the time, coins were still made of precious metals), but they also represent value: they can be used to make purchases. The heart, by extension, is a similar object, both valuable on its own and useful as a kind of bargaining chip. By giving it away, the wise man implies, the speaker loses both his valuable control over his own emotions, and the power he might wield as master of his own feelings.
Advice (Motif)
Most of “When I Was One-and-Twenty” is taken up by quotations from advice the speaker heard from a “wise man.” Interestingly, he actually leaves it vague whether this advice was directed to him specifically, or merely overheard. He writes only that he “heard” the wise man say these things. It’s possible that he’s taking to heart words that weren’t even meant for him. When Housman reveals, at the end of the poem, that the speaker is still very young, we also doubt his assessment of the man’s “wisdom.” Although the man’s words seem like an important source of knowledge, Housman suggests their significance may be less certain than the speaker believes.
