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    A Shropshire Lad
    A Shropshire Lad
    A Shropshire Lad
    Ebook54 pages32 minutes

    A Shropshire Lad

    By A. E. Housman

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    The charms of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896, continue to resonate today. Housman's first collection and his signature work, the poems here mix the styles of traditional English ballads and classical verse, and evoke the idyllic English countryside, explore the nature of friendship, bravery, and the passing of youth, among other themes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherQasim Idrees
    Release dateFeb 23, 2018
    ISBN9788827578209
    Author

    A. E. Housman

    Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) was born and brought up in the Bromsgrove region of Worcestershire, adjacent to Shropshire, and was educated locally and at St John's College, Oxford. Though he was a fine scholar, he failed to gin an Honours degree, and spent some years in the Patent Office in London. A series of brilliant academic articles secured him the Professorship of Latin at London University and he went on the become Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. Most famous for A Shropshire Lad (1896), Last Poems was published in 1922, More Poems appeared posthumously and Collected Poems in 1939.

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      Book preview

      A Shropshire Lad - A. E. Housman

      A Shropshire Lad

      A. E. Housman

      .

      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 and unity of values, through which Shropshire lads and landscapes are presented. It must be, however, in the miraculous fusing of the two. Whatever that secret is, the charm of it never fails after all these years to keep the poems preserved with a freshness and vitality, which are the qualities of enduring genius.

      WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE

      A SHROPSHIRE LAD

                I

                1887

                From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,

                The shires have seen it plain,

                From north and south the sign returns

                And beacons burn again.

                Look left, look right, the hills are bright,

                The dales are light between,

                Because 'tis fifty years to-night

                That God has saved the Queen.

                Now, when the flame they watch not towers

                About the soil they trod,

                Lads, we'll remember friends of ours

                Who shared the work with God.

                To skies that knit their heartstrings right,

                To fields that

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