Hail, Spring

In honor of the first day of spring, the A.E. Housman poem that I have read [or thought, since I pretty well know it by heart] every spring since I was the age of the one who tells the poet. I'm damn close up on my allotted threescore and ten, and it's still a good poem.


Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.