About: When I Was One-and-Twenty

When I Was One-and-Twenty is the first line of the untitled Poem XIII from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896), but has often been anthologised and given musical settings under that title. The piece is simply worded but contains references to the now superseded coins guineas and crowns. It is the monologue of a young man of twenty-two who reflects on the truth of the advice given him a year before not to give his heart away in love. Writing to his publisher in December, 1920, Housman scornfully observed of an illustrated edition of the poem, “How like an artist to think that the speaker is a woman!” A heterosexual male reading could still be given the lament then because, at the time, Housman's homosexuality was unsuspected. Later the more likely interpretation of the poem's inspiratio