A Shropshire Lad: XIII, WWhen I was one-and-twenty, by Alfred Edward Housman

A Shropshire Lad: XIII When I was one-and-twenty

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XIII XVII XVIII XIX XXI XVII XXXI XXXVII XXXVIII XL XLI L LII LIV LV LXII LXIII

	XIII			Q

	When I was one-and-twenty		C	Q
	I heard a wise man say,		C
	"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
	But not your heart away;
	Give pearls away and rubies	5
	But keep your fancy free."			Q
	But I was one-and-twenty,
	No use to talk to me.

	When I was one-and-twenty			Q
	I heard him say again,	10
	"The heart out of the bosom
	Was never given in vain;
	'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
	And sold for endless rue."
	And I am two-and-twenty	15	C
	And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

Key: V: Textual Variation. C: Commentary. Q: Question. Glossary

ASL XIII "When I was one-and-twenty"

Top ▲ Glossary

Line	Word	Glossary
3	crown	A coin worth five shillings, one quarter of a pound in pre-decimal currency. Consider the regal associations
3	guinea	One pound, one shilling
6	fancy	Here used as a noun: 1. An impulsive desire for something 2. An unfounded belief about something 3. The faculty of using the imagination playfully or inventively 4. Something created by the imagination, especially something of a playful or superficial nature Consider a suggestion of "fancy-free" - carefree, unconcerned
14	rue	Regreted

Top ▲ Commentary

Line	Commentary
	Date: Jan 1895
1	Twenty-one was the "age of majority"; the age at which one was considered truly an adult
2	The reference to an unspecified "wise man" gives the poem the feel of a moral tale; combined with the strict metre and rhyme, this suggests the folk-song tradition of English popular music
15	There is a rueful acknowledgement of the actual naivety of many a supposedly mature young person in their early twenties.
Whole poem	This is one of a number of poems in the selection which explore the painful nature of emotional experience
Metre	Stanzas of alternately rhyming lines of seven then six syllables in an iambic metre: this is a common form in Housman. The two syllable rhyme word in the odd numbered lines has an unstressed final syllable, known as a "feminine" ending

Top ▲ Questions

Line	Question
1	In a letter to Grant Richards (his publisher, from the second edition of ASL onwards), 20 Dec 1920, Housman criticised an illustration of this poem by Claud Lovat Fraser: "How like an artist to think that the speaker is a woman!" Apart from this evidence and the supposed narrator of the collection being 'Terence Hearsay', why else might we suppose the speaker to be a man? Also, what does Housman's comment to Richards tell us about Housman?
1, 7, 8	Apart from metrical reasons, why do you think Housman writes "one-and-twenty" rather than "twenty-one"? Consider the effect of "two-and twenty" in line 15.
6	What do you think is meant by "Keep your fancy free"?
Whole poem	There is a great deal of repetition in the poem, of words, phrases and in the structure; to what purpose is this put by the poet?