When I Was One And Twenty

Maryna Kagan Professor Dr. Z. Yablokova ENG 201­139 Dec 4, 2014

Poems “When I Was One­And­Twenty” and “My Heart Leaps Up”. In the poem “When I Was One­And­Twenty” by A. E. Housman, the speaker receives some advice from an older, wiser person not to rely on love too much. As it states in the first line of this poem, the speaker is twenty­one years old, and like any young person he ignores the advice. At the age of twenty­two he finds out that love hurts and the advice he has got, is truthful.

The regularity and accuracy in the structure and rhyme scheme of this poem gives a feeling that this young speaker has all his thoughts and his emotions under control now, but it wasn’t like that before. If to pay attention to the punctuation and the meaningful pauses of this poem, it seems like it is divided into two eight­line stanzas with semi­colons that neatly break each stanza in half. Also, each stanza begins with the same title line where the speaker says that he is twenty­one, and the second line belongs to the wise man saying his message. At the same time the two last lines of each stanza consist of the young speaker`s age at two time frames and his different response on the wise man`s little lessons at that time. It looks like he is a fool at the age of twenty­one but he becomes more emotionally mature and logical at twenty­two through his painful love experience. The contraposition of the age of the one­and­twenty, when the speaker is young and stupid, and the two­and­twenty, when he sounds much smarter, gives us the

idea of his maturing or growing up. Also, calling someone else wise means that the speaker is comparatively less than wise. In other words, he was stupid before, but in a year, he became smart enough to realize the truthfulness and wisdom of the pieces of advice. The words “endless rue” gives an impression of the regrets for not listening to the wise man (14). The speaker becomes