When I Was One And Twenty

The most painful poem about growing older ever written in English. Housman captures the specific cruelty of youth: we know everything, we listen to nothing, and by the time we understand what the old folk told us, the chance has passed. The poem moves from the speaker's confident dismissal of an old man's advice to the quiet devastation of twenty years later, when he encounters the same wisdom from a different angle and finds it true. That final image of life "drifting like a river / From darkness into darkness" has haunted readers for over a century. This is Housman at his finest: not precious, not sentimental, just achingly precise about how we waste our youth being young.