Transactional Model of Love
“When I Was One-and-Twenty” is centered around some advice the speaker received from a wise man one year ago. The man told him that love always ended in grief. At the time, the speaker ignored him, but now he sees that the advice was true. The wise man frames his negative vision of love in extremely transactional terms. He presents love as a commodity that can be bought and sold just like anything else.
We see this most explicitly in the first stanza, where the speaker quotes the wise man as saying “Give crowns and pounds and guineas / But not your heart away.” Crowns, pounds, and guineas are all denominations of English currency. The redundant list of different types of coins emphasizes that the wise man sees affection as just another kind of valuable object. The next two lines build on this idea, as the wise man declares, “give pearls away and rubies / But keep your fancy free.” Again, he suggests that love can be given away in the same way that valuable gems can. His injunction to keep “your fancy free” is interesting in this context. On one level, he’s saying we should retain our freedom, rather than chaining ourself to somebody else by falling in love with them. Yet we can also read “free” in an economic sense. In the wise man’s view, when our affections belong to us, they’re “free,” but once we give them away, they become an expensive commodity.
This attitude appears again in the second stanza, where the wise man describes love as a trade. We give the heart, and in exchange receive “sighs a plenty” and “endless rue.” Indeed, here love is even more explicitly transactional. In the first stanza, he referred to “giving” away valuable objects. Now, however, he speaks of being “paid” and “sold.” As readers of the poem, we might recognize his attitude as a more realistic response to the idealism of young love. Yet we also find, at the end of the poem, that the speaker is still a young man, and probably still naive. His bitter belief in the “wisdom” of the man’s cynical advice might tell us more about him than about love itself.
The Naivety of the Young
One of the most important ideas in “When I Was One-and-Twenty” is the naivety of the young. The speaker chastizes himself for his own foolishness as a younger man. We as readers can assume that this foolishness extends into the present day, which the speaker does not realize. The first stanza invokes the popular trope of an older person looking back at their youthful actions with regret. The speaker writes that there was “no use” giving him advice when he was young. Yet he also identifies his interlocutor as wise, suggesting that he now believes he should have listened to his advice.
In the second stanza, the tension between the speaker’s once-positive vision of love and the “wise man’s” negative attitude comes to a head. A year later, the speaker believes that the wise man was right, and he resents himself for his youthful naivety in ignoring the advice. If he listened, he implies, perhaps now he would still have his own heart, and would not be subjected to the “endless” grief of heartbreak.
However, the speaker also reveals that he is now only twenty-two years old. Like many young people, he overestimates his own maturity, believing that in the space of a year he has come to understand the world completely. Yet from the outside, we’re surprised how little time has passed, and recognize that the transformation of the speaker’s attitude may be shallow. The irony of the poem thus emphasizes that cynicism can be just as naive as optimism.
