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    A Shropshire Lad
    A Shropshire Lad
    A Shropshire Lad
    Ebook79 pages42 minutes

    A Shropshire Lad

    By A. E. (Alfred Edward) Housman

    4/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1950
    A Shropshire Lad

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    Reviews for A Shropshire Lad

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    • 5/5
      I was first introduced to the exquisite poetry of A.E. Housman in my grade ten English class (where we covered British literature from Beowulf to the early 20th century). I started to appreciate Housman then, but I really, really started to love his poetry when I listened to George Butterworth's lovely and evocative song-cycle rendition of A Shropshire Lad and realisesd that Housman's poems are not just meant to be read, but really and truly are meant to be sung, to be listened to as musical offerings (offerings showing joy, simplicity, but also the anguish of lost love, of growing up, and of destructive, manipulative war, that has the horrific power to destroy whole bastions of young men).
    • 4/5
      My expectations for this poem cycle were confounded. I'd got it into my head that A Shropshire Lad was a rural idyll about bucolic farm boys, milk maids and nostalgic reveries about "blue remembered hills". As there is practically none of that ("blue remembered hills" notwithstanding), I'd obviously constructed this false image myself based on nothing more than the title of the collection.Now, that's a bit of a shame as I was in the mood for (had a need for, in fact) a bit of idylic escapism to lift my mood. What Housman serves up instead is a series of poems of which the majority deal with death, sometimes by way of poetical allusion (autumnal trees shedding leaves, that sort of thing), thigh often directly stated. War is present in some poems, but mostly death simply stalks the countryside, or the city-bound country boy pining for his home fields. A few of the poems pay with the idea of the dead visiting the living, only to find their sweetheart in the arms of their best friend. These melancholy musings are not without their charm, though not exactly what I had in mind as a tonic (fortunately, Keats's remedy of getting out into nature was available to me). However, Housman goes rather further in a couple of poems, encouraging his 'lad' to die by suicide, and in one poem worthy of Poe, his 'lad' (there must be several of them, and presumably Shropshire must have been rather depopulated of young men if Housman is to be taken literally) actually cuts his own throat while on a date with his girlfriend.Some of the poems remind me of Khayyám-FitzGerald's preoccupation with mortality and the transience of life, and with the consolations of alcohol. The are some quatrains in Housman's collection but, as far as my amateur reading can tell, no deliberate imitation of the Rubáiyát.First published in 1896, I wonder whether the late Victorian morbid (from a modern perspective) relationship with death, and their often melodramatic sentimentality feeds into Housman's rather dark vision of life's ephemeral nature. How much was England and the Empire overshadowed by the growing inevitability of the death of the Old Queen? The impending death of the seemingly ever-present and eternal Victoria signalling the decease of a way of life, a break in cultural continuity, the end of days?Overall, an uneven (but enjoyable) collection, I think, though highly praised by J.R.R. Tolkien, who's probably a better judge than I. I'll read the poems again when I'm in a brighter mood and see whether the poems which aren't about death and shagging your dead mate's girlfriend make more of an impression on me.
    • 4/5
      I knew so many of these poems without realising it. My favourite is the one that begins: "White in the moon the long road lies..."
    • 5/5
      8/2012 I come to Housman when I'm hollow, when I'm lost, when I'm confused. I come here when I need to come here, and he takes me in, he comforts me with snark, with acute observation, with hilarity and bottomless woe. There's nobody, nobody at all like Housman. I have entire swaths of this by heart, and generally read a poem or two at need. Today I read it cover to cover and was, once again, entirely blown away.


      2010: What's to say of Housman? His words are like strange wine that changes one utterly once imbibed.

      "...that grace, that manhood gone..."
    • 3/5
      I was surprised to find I hadn't read A Shropshire Lad before. I had read a number of the poems, all rather good, and there are a number of phrases which have entered general circulation. Having read the entire collection now I can see why I hadn't done so before. There are a limited number of jewels, rather a lot of unexciting verse and a solid chunk of dreadful stuff. It's all on one note, of course, melancholic, bittersweet, nostalgic, triste. He can pretty well only write well in simple ballad style, but on a few occasions he does write so very well in them. I got to be intrigued as to what the difference was between the brilliant and the bad so I had a careful look at a couple. For example XL, probably his best known and definitely his best. It is full of memorable phrases - in fact the most famous Housman phrases come from this poem. 'The land of lost content' and 'blue remembered hills'. The poem is deliberately vague as to landscape. This is because he is looking into the past rather more than into a space which is why the phrase 'blue remembered hills' resonates so. Hills are blue because they are far away but he is not looking at them now. It is the land of lost content but probably, possibly because he never went there - they were the future, and distant. But the blue vagueness grows into the 'shining plain' (a lovely pun too) because we are on the 'happy highways' - Housman's regular metaphor for life - where he went, in the past again, and finally the last line made brilliant by using one word - 'come' instead of the more usual go. He can and did go to the hills later in his life (it seems likely that he never actually visited them until then!) but he cannot go to the past. He is describing, evoking something, somewhere he can see but can never 'go' to. XXVII "Is my team ploughing" is a perfect ballad building up to the last line which, while totally expected, is all the more bitter. The live lad lies easy in spite of lying by the dead lad's sweetheart. Housman again uses a simple word, lie, which weaves between its possible meanings in an intricate but simple development.XXI Bredon Hill I Once more it's the perfect control of the structure, that third rhyme which pulls the story and the emotion forward. It gives the statement an emphasis because it's repeating the rhythm of the line before. At the same time he uses a pattern of repeated words, especially in the last line, which sharpen what we see in a very simple way: "stay", 'come to church". "went to church", "would not wait" and the final devastating, "I will come".The exact opposite of something like IV Reveille where for metaphors we have a beach and burning ship, a vault of some sort which is trampled (a vault? trampled?) followed by a tent and mysterious straws. All very grandiose and terribly silly. Move to II, Loveliest of trees, on the other hand and the one image of the tree is used brilliantly and complexly. But then I think most, if not all, of the soldier off to war poems Like Reveille are dreadful, sub-Kiplingesque. Always be suspicious when someone who never went to war cheers you on to recruiting.Housman may have been a minor poet but there are enough brilliant jewels in this ragbag to justify reading what is, after all, a very short collection.
    • 5/5
      Poetry of quiet melancholy, done as well as ever it has been.
    • 4/5
      I normally don't advise reading an entire book of one poet's work in one go, but Housman's most highly regarded work seems to lend itself to taking it in all at once. Very accessible, both in rhythm and imagery, and bittersweet with death and nature themes throughout. Some fine work here; a few surprises. All in all, a nice evening's read.Os.
    • 3/5
      This will not be a critique of the poetry, because I'm not qualified. Rather, it is my opinion and feeling after having read them. My first impression was that they were simple and clean to read, with clear imagery. As I read them, I had a hard time believing that they were written before WWI, because the sentiment seemed to fit in so well with the returning lads from that war. I found some of them poignant, but as I continued reading, I wondered what made this man dwell so on the theme of death. My son would call him Emo. I found by the end, that a little of Housman goes a long way.
    • 5/5
      A Shropshire lad (1896) is one of the most celebrated collections of poems in English. Housman brings together themes of evanescent youth, beautiful English rural scenery, and untimely sudden death, hitting many of the same buttons as the German romantic poets of a hundred years earlier, and he does it in a deceptively simple, almost folkloric style that draws the reader straight into the world of the poems. The generally morbid subject-matter is lightened by an occasional touch of earthy humour, even self-mockery. In the penultimate poem, "Terence, this is stupid stuff", the poet debates with a friend the relative merits of poetry and beer:Oh, many a peer of England brewsLivelier liquor than the Muse- the poet concedes the point, but argues that poetry is better at preparing you for life's miseries than beer is!When you read these poems for the first time, you'll probably be surprised how many of their lines and phrases have entered the language. They are not poems of the sort you have to struggle through on the page, untangling dense webs of allusions, but rather poems that you want to learn by heart, to read aloud, to sing (all the great and good of 20th century English music have had a go at them at various times...).Many of the poems refer to the countryside of the Shropshire hills. It's an area where I used to go walking "when I was one-and-twenty" myself: when you stand on the Long Mynd or the Wrekin, at that age, it's difficult to resist the urge to declaim a bit of Housman. The poems seem to fit perfectly to the landscape, but famously, Housman didn't know that area at all when he wrote the poems: he was a Worcestershire lad himself, and the poems were mostly written in London. He seems to have picked Shropshire because he liked rhythm of the placenames and thought it would fit with the romantic pastoral idea of Englishness he was trying to convey. Maybe "Worcestershire" is too firmly attached to "Lea and Perrins" in the popular imagination...Housman has become something of a gay icon, of course, and (as the title implies) the subjects of these poems are mostly somewhat idealised young men, usually farm-workers and soldiers. Women appear only peripherally, as mothers or sweethearts. Quite a few of the poems are addressed by one young man to another, often from the grave, but they deal (explicitly, at least) with friendship, rather than love, between men. Obviously, these are poems that resonate with gay readers, but I think just about anyone would get a good deal of pleasure from them. [Another of those books with lots of copies on LT that no-one has bothered to review so far, presumably because it is so well-known]

    Book preview

    A Shropshire Lad - A. E. (Alfred Edward) Housman

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

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    Title: A Shropshire Lad

    Author: A. E. Housman

    Commentator: William Stanley Braithwaite

    Release Date: June 2, 2009 [EBook #5720]

    Last Updated: February 4, 2013

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SHROPSHIRE LAD ***

    Produced by Albert Imrie, and David Widger

    A SHROPSHIRE LAD

    By A. E. Housman

    Introduction by William Stanley Braithwaite

    1919

    INTRODUCTION

    The method of the poems in A Shropshire Lad illustrates better than any theory how poetry may assume the attire of reality, and yet in speech of the simplest, become in spirit the sheer quality of loveliness. For, in these unobtrusive pages, there is nothing shunned which makes the spectacle of life parade its dark and painful, its ironic and cynical burdens, as well as those images with happy and exquisite aspects. With a broader and deeper background of experience and environment, which by some divine special privilege belongs to the poetic imagination, it is easier to set apart and contrast these opposing words and sympathies in a poet; but here we find them evoked in a restricted locale- an English county-where the rich, cool tranquil landscape gives a solid texture to the human show. What, I think, impresses one, thrills, like ecstatic, half-smothered strains of music, floating from unperceived instruments, in Mr. Housman's poems, is the encounter his spirit constantly endures with life. It is, this encounter, what you feel in the Greeks, and as in the Greeks, it is a spiritual waging of miraculous forces. There is, too, in Mr. Housman's poems, the singularly Grecian Quality of a clean and fragrant mental and emotional temper, vibrating equally whether the theme dealt with is ruin or defeat, or some great tragic crisis of spirit, or with moods and ardours of pure enjoyment and simplicities of feeling. Scarcely has any modern book of poems shown so sure a touch of genius in this respect: the magic, in a continuous glow saturating the substance of every picture and motive with its own peculiar essence.

    What has been called the cynical bitterness of Mr. Housman's poems, is really nothing more than his ability to etch in sharp tones the actualities of experience. The poet himself is never cynical; his joyousness is all too apparent in the very manner and intensity of expression. The lads of Ludlow are so human to him, the hawthorn and broom on the Severn shores are so fragrant with associations, he cannot help but compose under a kind of imaginative wizardry of exultation, even when the immediate subject is grim or grotesque. In many of these brief, tense poems the reader confronts a mask, as it were, with appalling and distorted lineaments; but behind it the poet smiles, perhaps sardonically, but smiles nevertheless. In the real countenance there are no tears or grievances, but a quizzical, humorous expression which shows, when one has torn the subterfuge away, that here is a spirit whom life may menace with its contradictions and fatalities, but never dupe with its circumstance and mystery.

    All this quite points to, and partly explains, the charm of the poems in A Shropshire Lad . The fastidious care with which each poem is built out of the simplest of technical elements, the precise tone and color of language employed to articulate impulse and mood, and the reproduction of objective substances for a clear visualization of character and scene, all tend by a sure and unfaltering composition, to present a lyric art unique in English poetry of the last twenty-five years.

    I dare say I have scarcely touched upon the secret of Mr. Housman's book. For some it may radiate from the Shropshire life he so finely etches; for others, in the vivid artistic simplicity

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