Tenth line: to see the cherry hung with snow
A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, II (1896).
The poem starts with the loveliest thing in the wood, a cherry in full white bloom. Then it does the arithmetic nobody asked for: seventy springs, twenty already gone, fifty left. Fifty sounds like a lot until you spend them on looking at flowers.
The line I kept:
And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.
He does not decide to hurry, and he does not decide to grieve. He decides to go and look. The counting is not a complaint, it is a reason to walk out the door.
Ten nights now. What I notice is that the practice is starting to count its own time the way the poem does: not how long have I got, but have I gone to look yet.
— Alex Senior, paper.wf/alex-senior