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A Shropshire Lad

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A.E. Housman wrote beautiful poems filled with melancholy and pessimism. Most of his poems were composed in the 1890s when Housman was, admittedly, under tremendous psychological stress. This stress undoubtedly contributed greatly to the sad and mournful tone of his poetry. "In the world of Housman's poetry, youth fades to dust, lovers are unfaithful, and death is the tranquil end of everything."

Housman, himself, led a life of hardship. His mother died when he was twelve and his father began a losing battle with alcohol and a long slide into poverty. When Housman went to college, he developed a passionate attachment to another student named Moses Jackson. Jackson did not return Housman's love, but the two did develop a deep and abiding friendship. Housman, however, wanted more, and the loss of Jackson plunged him into a suicidal depression that was to last for the rest of his life.

In all of Housman's poems certain themes predominate, the most common being time and the inevitability of death. Housman sees time and aging as horrible processes and views each day, not as one day of life to be lived, but as one step closer to the inevitable end of life. Cleanth Brooks stated, "Time is, with Housman, always the enemy." Unable even to see the joy and beauty inherent in life, Housman concentrates instead on the peace and serenity death will bring. Housman often uses symbolism to express images of death and decay and the reader must sometimes search the poem in order to make the connection.

Housman's poetry also tells us that he viewed the world as hostile and cruel, a world that had been abandoned by its maker. His lyrics scrutinize with cool, detached irony the impersonal universe, the vicious world into which man was placed to endure existence and fend for himself.

The directness and simplicity of much of Housman's poetry have been viewed by many critic's as faults; for this reason he has often been described as "adolescent" and has been relegated to the status of a minor poet. This criticism is most unfair as Housman's poetry is unsurpassed in its sadness and melancholy and the apparent ease with which it is written.

The range of meter that Housman uses varies from four to sixteen syllables in length. John MacDonald claims "What is remarkable about Housman's poetry is the amount and the subtlety variation within a single stanza, and the almost uncanny felicity with which the stresses of the metrical pattern coincide with the normal accents of the sentence." Housman uses monosyllabic and simple words in his poetry, but the words that he chooses to use fit together rhythmically and express the idea with a clear image.

To express his vivid images, Housman sparingly uses epithets that are both original and creative, such as "light-leaved spring," and the "bluebells of the listless plain." These well-chosen epithets cause Housman's poetry to be decorative and filled with images of great beauty.

A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896 at Housman's own expense, is his best-known work. Although critics paid it scant attention, the public raved about its bittersweet poems which were, according to Housman, "more physical than intellectual." The poems in this collection are generally brisk, simple, written in a precise language and regular rhythm. Many of them relate directly or indirectly to Housman's love for Moses Jackson. Many of these poems contain images of the landscape, the changing of the seasons, the blossoming of trees and flowers, the fading of youth and, of course, death. B.J. Leggett says these "poems show an ongoing structure which carries the persona from innocence to knowledge or from expectation to disillusionment."

In the poem entitled The Loveliest of Trees, the speaker discovers human mortality and fading youth. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/Is hung with bloom along the bough,/And stands about the woodland ride/Wearing white for Eastertide./Now, of my threescore years and ten,/Twenty will not come again,/And take from seventy springs a score,/It only leaves me fifty more./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.

The speaker of this lovely poem, at first so optimistic and hopeful, comes to grasp the brevity of his life, and this leads him from innocence to knowledge. His vision of a springtime world of rebirth is altered by his sudden sense of his own transience, so that he can ultimately only see the cherry as "hung with snow," an obvious suggestion of death.

Other themes inherent in Housman's poetry include the loss of youthful dreams, the isolation of adolescence and the sorrows of love. Many of Housman's poems begin in a blithe manner and end with a shift in mood and tone to the negative and the dismal.

Sadly, A.E. Housman has never been a fashionable poet. He does, however, continue to maintain an audience and his reputation remains steady. The melancholy and pessimism inherent in all of his poems is unsurpassed in its beauty and serenity and Housman is a poet who certainly deserves to be both read and studied far more widely. A.E. Housman was a tragic figure, but he was one whose life and art surpassed the mundane and came to inhabit the realm of the extraordinary.

It's doubtful that any Engish speaking child in America made it through school without reading:

TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG

The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay, And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honors out, Runners whom reknown outran And the name died before the man.

So set, before the echoes fade, The fleet foot on the sill of shade, And hold to the low lintel up The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, And find unwithered on its curls The garland briefer than a girl's.

This sample captures the ironic melancholy air of A Shropshire Lad. The poems generally concern country lads who go off to war, die young or have their hearts broken. Not exactly feel good stuff, but it is beautiful.

GRADE: B

I think I never want to see
Another stanza by A.E.
I pity now the friends of Terence,
And eke his siblings, pets and parents.

For oh, good Lord the verse he made--
Too grim and too much in the shade:
The doomstruck lad, the Severn missed,
The Ludlow fair where he got pissed,

The London blues, the snow-hung orchard,
Young life cut short in syntax tortured,
And favorite of all his themes,
The Shropshire schoolboy's martial dreams.

Brave verse to stop a soldier shirking
By one whose work was patent-clerking.
"Stand up, be brave, lad, if you please,
So poets here may live at ease.

"And we shall rhyme and wring our hands
When you're cashiered in distant lands.
For really, 'tis not bad, the grave--
No care, no pain, no need to shave.

"So blah blah blah by Severnside,
And good for you, young suicide."
Well, he's dead too, now, old A.E.
Arrived where he most longed to be.

What's done is done, some good, much bad,
But still he toils, this Shropshire lad,
Producing yet from under plow
Some wholesome food for Shropshire cow.