Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.
[5] This first version consists of only two stanzas reading as follows: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodlands wide Wearing snow for Eastertide.
[10] It also presents a young, naïve and innocent man's realization of his own mortality[11] seen through the analogy of the short-lived blossom of the typical – rather than of any individual – cherry tree.
Hubert Bland, reviewing that volume in The New Age, wrote of the "per[fect] simplicity [that] Mr Housman has given it with the swift, unfaltering touch of a master's hand".
[19] Nevile Watts instanced it as one of the Housman poems which, save for their lack of "magic", show him to have been worthy of "a seat beside the two greatest of our lyrists – Shakespeare and Blake".
[17] Peter Edgerly Firchow, for example, considered it a failure, the second stanza being too convoluted and verbose to perform its pivotal role in the poem, and nature being presented in too abstract a form.
[7] Terence Allan Hoagwood, on the other hand, praised the "complexity of feeling that is remarkable given the simple (and few) words that Housman has used",[22] and D. T. Siebert called it "a little masterpiece of carpe diem".
[23] No book of verse since the time of Shakespeare has been turned to by English songwriters so often as A Shropshire Lad, and of the poems contained therein "Loveliest of trees" is one of the most frequently set,[24] over 60 such songs and choral works being known.