A few years ago my wife and I planted some cherry trees on our land in France, and now they are in bloom. The strange thing is that I can stand and look at the blossom, if not for hours (one must not exaggerate), at least for several minutes at a time—and repeatedly. I enjoy watching the bees at their work. I am glad to be alive.
I cannot help but think of A.E. Housman’s poem as I stand looking at the flowers, white as a wedding dress:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
It is only comparatively late in my life, I am ashamed to say, that I have learned truly to appreciate the small beauties of the world, such as lichen on the bark of trees, moss, and ivy growing on ancient stone walls, and so forth. Housman wrote his poem (or rather published it) when he was only 37, and put it in the mouth of a 20-year-old boy, much wiser than I:
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.
So young, and yet so aware already of the fleetingness of human existence! When I was his age, I thought that my life would go on forever and that therefore I did not have to seize the day because there would always be another day to seize. There would be time enough for the likes of the cherry blossom if I ever deigned to notice it at all.
Of course, Housman’s young man, and Housman himself would have been much more familiar with death than was I, which would have given them a heightened awareness of how quickly life would pass. When Housman was born, in 1859, at least a quarter of children died before the age of 5, and one in six before he was 12 months old. Housman’s much-loved mother died when he was 12, and her death caused him to lose his religious belief. Death was not then the best-kept secret of life, as it is now, hidden away out of sight as a kind of social faux pas, or locked away from view as mad relatives once were, but an ever-present reality that could result from a trivial accident or seemingly minor illness. In fact, it would have taken a special kind of obtuseness not to have noticed the fragility of the human hold on life.
The transience of our existence is hardly a new subject for reflection or poetry, but poetry is not the medium in which new ideas are advanced; rather, it is the realm of “what oft was thought/But ne’er so well express’d,” as Pope, also at the age of 20, put it.
