The Full Text of “To an Athlete Dying Young”
1The time you won your town the race
2We chaired you through the market-place;
3Man and boy stood cheering by,
4And home we brought you shoulder-high.
5Today, the road all runners come,
6Shoulder-high we bring you home,
7And set you at your threshold down,
8Townsman of a stiller town.
9Smart lad, to slip betimes away
10From fields where glory does not stay,
11And early though the laurel grows
12It withers quicker than the rose.
13Eyes the shady night has shut
14Cannot see the record cut,
15And silence sounds no worse than cheers
16After earth has stopped the ears.
17Now you will not swell the rout
18Of lads that wore their honours out,
19Runners whom renown outran
20And the name died before the man.
21So set, before its echoes fade,
22The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
23And hold to the low lintel up
24The still-defended challenge-cup.
25And round that early-laurelled head
26Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
27And find unwithered on its curls
28The garland briefer than a girl’s.
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“To an Athlete Dying Young” Introduction
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"To an Athlete Dying Young" is an elegiac poem by the British Victorian poet A.E. Housman, originally published in his bestselling collection Shropshire Lad (1896). The poem focuses on a funeral held for an athlete who, as the title suggests, has died young. The speaker praises—or seems to praise—the young man for departing early from his earthy life, but in doing so also reveals a general anxiety and, perhaps, confusion about the meaning of mortality. Nothing is revealed about the circumstances around the young man's death, and there is a tension running throughout the poem between the grim realities of death and the speaker's attempt to memorialize the athlete through elegant language.
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“To an Athlete Dying Young” Summary
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The speaker begins by recounting a memory about the young athlete of the title. In this memory, the athlete won an inter-town race and was carried through the streets aloft on the shoulders of the townsfolk. Men and boys cheered them on, and the procession carried the athlete all the way home (still on their shoulders).
Moving into the poem's present, the speaker notes that, along the same road that the race runs down, the townsfolk are again bringing the athlete home on their shoulders—but this time, it's to bury him. The athlete is now a citizen of a quieter town.
The speaker praises the young man for dying early and escaping the place where glory is fleeting (essentially, the earth, or this mortal life). In that same place, laurel (a shrub often used given to someone as a form of praise) dies even faster than roses do.
The dark night of death has closed the athlete's eyes, which means he'll never have to see his running record broken. And silence sounds just as good as celebration since, given that the athlete is buried, he can't actually hear either of them.
The athlete will never have to join the ranks of young men whose glory faded. Those men's fame outpaced them, meaning their reputations died before they did.
This stanza could be addressed either to the townsfolk or the athlete. It either tells the townsfolk to set down the athlete's casket before the echoes of his running victory turn to silence, or it tells the athlete himself to put his foot on the boundary between life and death. Either the townsfolk or the athlete should then hold up the athlete's trophy, which technically still belongs to him.
The speaker imagines that in the underworld the athlete will still be wearing his victory crown, and the weak souls of that world will crowd around to stare at him. His garland will not yet have died, but it will be as short as one worn by a girl.
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“To an Athlete Dying Young” Themes
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Youth and Glory
“To an Athlete Dying Young” describes the burial of a young athletic man. The speaker directly addresses the deceased, both lamenting and, in a way, celebrating the fact that the man’s youthful success is now preserved in death. The poem characterizes youth as a fleeting time of energy, passion, and vigor, during which fame and admiration come easily to young men like this one. But whether it’s through death or aging, the poem argues, youth is gone almost as soon as it arrives, and glory and popularity will ultimately vanish too.
On its surface, the poem takes an unusual approach by praising the athlete for dying young. This praise is neither entirely sincere nor entirely ironic—it’s both—but it allows the speaker to express their own ideas about the meaning of youth and how it functions in this young man’s culture. Youth is an obvious theme even in the title, and the poem picks up on this right from the start. The dead man’s living days are characterized as a time of achievement, celebration, and excitement, with the speaker recounting how the young man won a race for his town and was carried through the streets by his fellow townspeople. The young man was in his youthful peak, popular and athletically strong.
The day of the funeral is presented (somewhat ironically) as almost equally celebratory, as the townspeople carry the man’s casket to the burial place. The young man, though dead, is preserved in his prime—his funeral is full of admirers because he didn’t live long enough for his youthful glory to fade. The speaker appears to praise the man for dying young (“Smart lad, to slip betimes away”). Though it’s not specified, this praise raises the possibility that the death was suicide in that it may have been a conscious decision. Either way, the speaker approves—or appears to approve.
The reason why the speaker praises the premature death is that it prevents the athlete from having to witness the gradual fading-away of his youth. The young man has departed from “fields where glory does not stay.” He’ll never see his “record” broken or hear the cheering crowds fall silent. His name won’t die before he himself does—that is, he won’t have to see his youthful popularity diminish over the years. Indeed, the young athlete becomes enshrined in the collective memory of his youth. He will always be the popular athlete he was when he died. That’s why he will retain the “still-defended challenge-cup”—because he’ll never race again, no one will ever know if he could have been outrun.
Though he is dead, then, the athlete’s “glory” will “stay”—in the speaker’s opinion at least. Perhaps there is a lingering hint of jealousy or envy in the speaker’s position, as the speaker senses the coming arc of their own life towards old age and, eventually, death. The speaker’s exaggerated praise of this early death also suggests an ironic tone—perhaps the poem is implicitly critiquing the society that places so much value on youthful glory at the expense of other forms of achievement.
Youth, then, is presented as the time when it’s easiest to achieve glory and the adoration of others. But youth is also fleeting and impossible to hold on to. The speaker sees the athlete as having come closest to achieving this impossibility—because the athlete died young, he will never lose his youth to old age. The poem ironically suggests that perhaps this fate is better than watching one’s glory fade over time.
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Fear and Mortality
“To an Athlete Dying Young” is an elegy—a poem composed in honor of someone who has died. It tries to confront mortality, but perhaps reveals more about how the speaker's anxieties about death. The speaker seems to fear the permanence of death, dwelling on its contrasts with the athlete's vibrant life. The more the speaker tries to make sense of death, though, the more frightening it seems, suggesting that there's no point in trying to avoid death's inevitable mysteries.
The poem takes place at a transitional moment between life and death. In the second stanza, the poem makes clear its interest in the transition from life to death, describing the townspeople setting the young athlete down at his “threshold.” The athlete is now the “Townsman of a stiller town.” This partly describes the way in which the town has fallen silent because of the tragic death, but it also alludes to a kind of underworld. This “stiller town” is a haunting image, perhaps hinting at the speaker’s subconscious fears of death. The meaning of the young man’s life was linked to his physical abilities—his speed and movement—which are stopped abruptly in death. The stillness of this underworld speaks to the permanence of death, playing on the idea of everlasting rest.
The poem further develops this idea of an underworld in an attempt to, paradoxically, put a positive spin on the tragedy and make death seem less fearsome. If, as the last stanza states, the dead will flock to see the young man when he arrives in the afterlife, his status and popularity will, in some way, be restored. Again, though the surface tone of the speaker appeals to ideas of glory in death, the actual image of the almost zombie-like inhabitants of the underworld is more unsettling than reassuring. They “gaze” at the laurel, but they themselves are “strengthless,” seeming almost stupefied. This image undermines any sense that the athlete’s glory can live on in the underworld. Surely, he too must now be one of the “strengthless.”
The speaker's musings about the underworld come across as a kind of wishful thinking when faced with life’s one true certainty—death. Essentially, the speaker is trying to weave poetry out of the heightened emotion of a very grim occasion. It seems as if the speaker is trying to take the sting out of death, believing that by presenting mortality as something heroic and noble, it can be made less frightening.
However, the speaker ends up undermining their own fantasies. In stanza 4, for example, the speaker offers an unsettling concrete detail about the young man’s actual fate in death: the earth will “stop” his ears (which just means block or fill up). And this stopping—this coming to a halt—is another example of the permanent “stillness” of death. Even sound depends on movement of air—but in the physical reality of lying dead in the ground, all that’s left is silence, the sound of nothingness. This gruesome but ultimately realistic image further destabilizes the speaker’s attempt to glorify death.
Accordingly, then, the poem makes most sense as a kind of conversation between the speaker and mortality itself. The speaker tries to combat the fear of death by making sense out of it, but the physical presence of the young athlete’s body reminds the speaker—and the reader—that death is coming no matter what, and its mysteries can never quite be solved by the living.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “To an Athlete Dying Young”
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Lines 1-4
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.As promised by its title, the poem is directly addressed to the young man who has recently died. He is, of course, not part of this conversation—making the entire poem an apostrophe. This choice sets up an immediate tension: if the athlete can't answer or indeed even hear the poem, then whom is the speaker really speaking to? This subtle mystery foreshadows the way the poem eventually comes to seem more like a conversation between the speaker and death itself.
The opening launches straight into a memory of the young athlete, specifically the time that he won a race for his town. Presumably, then, this refers to an inter-town competition, and the victory brought with it popularity and admiration. This is made explicit by the unusual verb in line 2: "chaired." The townsfolk, proud of the achievements of their local "lad," carried him through the streets in a kind of victory parade. The mention of "market-place" also marks the setting as a quintessentially British market town, and this air of "Britishness" is part of what made A Shropshire Lad (the collection from which this is taken) a popular book.
Lines 3 and 4 reinforce the sense of celebration and admiration in this memory. With the phrase "Man and Boy," the poem suggests that this kind of sporting popularity is tied to ideas of stereotypically masculine strength and glory. The alliteration of "cheering" with "chaired" also creates a sense of poetic "volume," which emphasizes the jubilant atmosphere that surrounded the young athlete's win at the race. Line 4 reiterates that the athlete was brought home "shoulder-high," setting up the comparison between this remembered moment and the poem's present, in which the athlete is similarly carried—but for a very different reason.
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Lines 5-8
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
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Lines 9-12
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. -
Lines 13-16
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears -
Lines 17-20
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man. -
Lines 21-24
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup. -
Lines 25-28
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.
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“To an Athlete Dying Young” Symbols
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Laurel
The laurel wreath is part of the poem's allusions to classical Greece. In Ancient Greece, the laurel wreath was worn by victorious athletes or poets to mark their success. The Greek god Apollo is often depicted wearing one himself.
The laurel represents sporting achievement and physical prowess. In marking its wearer as a champion, it also signals public admiration and status. Put simply, those who wear the laurel are the best of the best.
But as the poem points out, laurel is also a plant, and plants are living things. When they're cut, pretty soon they wither and die. Accordingly, the laurel is also a sign—in this poem at least—of life's impermanence.
In the poem's closing stanza, the "strenghless dead" are depicted as gathering around the athlete to look at his laurel. Perhaps here it is a kind of alien object, a simple curiosity rather than a sign of glory. Through this shift in the symbol, the poem darkly suggests that the athlete's earthly success might not do him much good now that he's dead and buried.
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“To an Athlete Dying Young” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration is used quite frequently in "To an Athlete Dying Young," usually to reinforce the poem's thematic points or to create a sonic echo of its literal meaning.
In the first stanza, for example, it links "chaired" with the word "cheering." Here, the speaker is recounting a memory in which the townspeople carried the athlete—victorious in a race—through the streets. The alliteration links the words through sound to reinforce that they are linked in meaning too. Both are meant to conjure a sense of celebration, and tying them together by alliteration shows that they are part of the same occasion.
Line 5 uses alliteration in the phrase "road all runners come." Here, the shared /r/ sound creates a sense of exertion and physical effort. The two /r/s are separated by just one syllable, making the letter sound persistent, as though it is determined to exert its presence on the line.
Line 19 reintroduces this alliterative /r/ sound, again linked with the act of running. Three /r/s make the sound even more persistent, suggesting desperation (though the third is consonance, not alliteration). This is likely intended to evoke the inevitability of what it describes: all "runners" who live to an old age will be "outrun" by "renown:" fame will escape them. Both instances bring to life both the runners' physical efforts and, perhaps, the broader idea of humans doggedly trying to outrun death.
In line 13, "shady" and "shut" alliterate. Here, the speaker is talking about the athlete's eyes, now closed in death. Both words are associated with darkness, and the fact there is a pair of matching sounds perhaps represents the two closed eyes.
In lines 21 and 22, the poem discusses the athlete's echoing footsteps. To bring this to sonic life, /f/ sounds are placed throughout both lines, creating a linguistic echo to match the lines' literal meaning.
Finally, the last line links "garland" with "girl's." Here, the alliteration feels like a decoration, a way of reinforcing the image of a garlanded young girl. The image of a pretty child, which is so different from that of the striving athlete, makes the athlete's garland seem suddenly meaningless, and the alliteration reinforces the idea that his accomplishments might not matter much in the underworld.
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Allusion
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Apostrophe
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Irony
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Metaphor
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Paradox
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Polyptoton
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“To an Athlete Dying Young” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Chaired
- Threshold
- Lad
- Betimes
- Laurel
- Record
- Stopped
- Swell
- Rout
- Renown
- Fleet
- Sill
- Lintel
- Garland
Chaired-
To chair someone is to carry them aloft, possibly on an actual chair.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “To an Athlete Dying Young”
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Form
"To an Athlete Dying Young" is an elegy, a poem written in honor of someone or something that has died. It is not a eulogy, which is a text intended to be read out at a funeral. In keeping with the elegy form, the poem in part tries to praise the young athlete and, in turn, to lament his death.
The poem is made up of seven quatrains, or four-line stanzas, which can be loosely divided into three sections. The first stanza is a memory, and the only point at which the speaker looks exclusively at the past. Stanzas two through six are part of the poem's discussion of the athlete's funeral and death, and see the speaker trying to find the merits in dying young. The third section is the last stanza, in which the speaker imagines the future for the athlete, conjuring up an image of the afterlife.
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Meter
"To an Athlete Dying Young" has a regular meter based on four stresses in each line (tetrameter). It is mostly iambic (following an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern).
Generally speaking, the meter is intended to reflect the solemn procession that the poem describes. The metrical regularity has a deliberateness to it, representing the slow but purposeful movement of the townsfolk towards the burial place. Take lines 5-8 in the second quatrain:
Today, | the road | all runn- | ers come,
Shoul- | der-high | we bring | you home,
And set | you at | your thres- | hold down,
Towns- | man of | a still- | er town.The above example also showcases the use of catalexis (in the second and fourth lines of the second stanza). This is the removal of the first syllable of the first poetic foot; note how there is no unstressed syllable starting these lines. This happens a few times in the poem, adding small flourishes to an otherwise steady, plodding pace.
Overall, the sound of the meter is very close to that used in hymns, especially those that were popular in the Victorian era. This, of course, makes sense, as the poem describes a Victorian funeral.
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Rhyme Scheme
"To an Athlete Dying Young" has a couplet rhyme scheme throughout: AABB in the first stanza, and then following that same pattern through each stanza of the poem. Almost all of the rhymes are clear, perfect rhymes as well ("race" and place"; "by" and "high"; etc.).
The regularity of the rhyme is, in part, characteristic of Housman as a poet. Many of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, the collection from which this poem is taken, follow similarly simple schemes. This gives the poem a song-like structure that is particularly close to the sound of a hymn.
The use of couplets means that the entire poem unfolds in pairs of rhymes. This pairing is gently suggestive of one of the poem's key images: running. People's admiration for the athlete was based on his ability to, put simply, use his legs more efficiently than anyone else. In other words, his success was based on two units of a pair working well together. The couplets, then, evoke a sense of controlled and purposeful momentum.
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“To an Athlete Dying Young” Speaker
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The reader doesn't learn much about the specific identity of the speaker in this poem. It does seem fair to presume that the speaker counts themself as one of the townspeople, given the mention of "We" in the second line.
The speaker addresses the athlete directly, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they knew one another. The speaker looks at the merits of dying young, but in doing so perhaps reveals the speaker's own fears about death (e.g., in the unwittingly gruesome descriptions of the fourth stanza). In the third stanza, the speaker calls the athlete a "smart lad." Though "lad" is a fairly informal term, and can be a kind of term of endearment for a younger man, this still doesn't give enough information to confirm that the athlete was known personally to the speaker. It subtly suggests the speaker is not a particularly young person, or at least that the speaker is somewhat older than this lad; perhaps this is in part what fuels the speaker's anxiety about death.
The speaker's consistent use of the second-person pronoun makes the poem almost read like a conversation. Except, of course, there is only one person speaking. The "you," then, helps highlight the athlete's inability to reply. This emphasizes the reality of the situation—that the young man is gone forever.
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“To an Athlete Dying Young” Setting
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Generally speaking, the poem is set on the day of the athlete's funeral in the athlete's hometown. The reader learns this from the second stanza, just after the speaker has recounted a memory of a very different occasion in the first stanza: the time when the young athlete won his race and was celebrated by his townspeople.
Though the poem may not state it explicitly, readers often detect a sense of Britishness in Housman's poems when it comes to setting. That's not as obvious in this poem as it in others from the same collection (A Shropshire Lad), but the use of "lad" is distinctly British English. Furthermore, the mention of a "market-place" evokes the kind of market-based town that is very common in England.
There is a second setting at play in the poem too. This is a kind of underworld, a land of the dead that will welcome the athlete once he has passed through or over the "threshold." This is, of course, constructed according to the speaker's imagination. It has a distinctly classical atmosphere, the "strengthless dead" recalling the bodiless souls that occupy the Ancient Greek afterlife. Line 8 hints at this underworld, whereas the final stanza deals with it explicitly.
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Literary and Historical Context of “To an Athlete Dying Young”
Literary Context
"To an Athlete Dying Young" was first published in A. E. Housman's 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad. The collection's 63 poems revolve around themes of death, time, and the fleeting nature of youth. Though initially rejected by publishers and not an immediate success, the collection's link to an ideal of "Englishness" ("Shropshire" is an English county) made it a hit a few years after its release. The collection also valorizes soldiers, which eventually helped lead to its popularity throughout Britain during the Boer War as well as World War I.
A Shropshire Lad has inspired both praise and condemnation, and Housman remains a poet whose literary reputation is up for debate. For some, he's a sensitive soul whose poetry captures a particular sense of place. For others, he's a fusty writer with an almost adolescent way of looking at the world. Ezra Pound, the famous modernist, once characterized Housman's poetry as "woe, etc."
In its praise of the beauty of nature, A Shopshire Lad continues the tradition of earlier Romantic poets. Housman's use of simple meter and rhyme, meanwhile, echoes that of other Victorian poets like Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.
Housman was also a keen and prominent classical scholar. This influence shows itself in "To an Athlete Dying Young." Laurel wreaths adorned the heads of victorious athletes or poets in ancient Greece and, indeed, the poem's depiction of the underworld has more in common with classical ideas than any portrayal of eternal Christian heaven.
Historical Context
Housman published A Shropshire Lad in 1896. This places it at the tail-end of the Victorian era, a time during which Britain extended the reach of its empire around the world and made significant developments in transportation and infrastructure. This was also a period of strict morals and religiosity on the one hand and scientific challenges to the accepted dogma on the other; geological discoveries and Darwin's theories of evolution led to a crisis of faith as many questioned the biblical account of the world's creation. The speaker of the poems in A Shropshire Lad finds no solace in religion, instead seeing the universe as hostile to humanity.
Housman was in his 30s when he published A Shropshire Lad and insisted that the poems were not overtly biographical. "I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time," he wrote in a later letter. The poems' outlook, Housman also said, stemmed from his "observation of the world."
Housman reportedly had young male readers in mind when he wrote the collection, which grew in popularity after Britain began fighting the Boer War. This was a conflict that took place in what is now referred to as South Africa from 1899-1902. It was euphemistically called "The Last of the Gentleman's Wars," but it was anything but; casualties amounted to 60,000 people. The collection's themes of Britishness, youth, death, and nostalgia resonated even more strongly at the onset of World War I; the book was taken by many British soldiers into that conflict.
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More “To an Athlete Dying Young” Resources
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External Resources
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A Shropshire Lad — The full text of Housman's most popular book of poems, from which "To an Athlete Dying Young" is taken.
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The Invention of Love — A clip from a play by Tom Stoppard, which imagines A.E. Housman visiting the classical underworld.
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Meryl Streep Reads Housman — Meryl Streep reads the poem in this clip from the Oscar-winning film Out of Africa, set at the time of British colonial rule in Kenya.
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Ezra Pound's Parody — In this poem, American modernist poet Ezra Pound mocks Housman's tendency towards "woe."
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Shropshire's History — A web resource about the history of Shropshire, the English county in which Housman's most famous work is set.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by A. E. Housman
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