A Shropshire Lad
A. E. Housman (1859–1936), 1896
★ 4.01 from 3.1k ratings on Goodreads
Sixty-three clipped, singing poems about cherry blossom, lost hometowns, soldiers and the brevity of youth. The poems move with a clipped, singing rhythm, carrying melancholy, memory and nature in plain, grave lyrical voices.
Feels like melancholy, nostalgia and wonder. About morality, memory and nature.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy short, lyrical poems about memory, nature and youth’s brevity. Its late-Victorian diction can feel archaic, and the mood stays consistently grave rather than varied.
Why read it
These sixty-three poems offer a compact, musical way to sit with memory and loss, and Housman’s exact, restrained lines reward close attention.
Pages from the book
What if the landscape of your happiest memories is closed to you now?
Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come again. What do you do with the arithmetic of a life measured in springs?
Loveliest of trees, the cherry nowIs hung with bloom along the bough,And stands about the woodland rideWearing 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 bloomFifty springs are little room,About the woodlands I will goTo see the cherry hung with snow. He has eaten so much poison that dinner no longer frightens him.
There was a king reigned in the East:There, when kings will sit to feast,They get their fill before they thinkWith poisoned meat and poisoned drink.He gathered all that springs to birthFrom the many-venomed earth;First a little, thence to more,He sampled all her killing store;And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,Sate the king when healths went round.They put arsenic in his meatAnd stared aghast to watch him eat;They poured strychnine in his cupAnd shook to see him drink it up: A. E. Housman.Housman was a professor of Latin at Cambridge and a formidable textual critic; he edited the Roman poet Manilius and kept his poetry carefully separate from his scholarship.
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Questions readers ask
- Is A Shropshire Lad for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy short, lyrical poems about memory, nature and youth’s brevity. Its late-Victorian diction can feel archaic, and the mood stays consistently grave rather than varied.
- What is A Shropshire Lad like?
- The poems move with a clipped, singing rhythm, carrying melancholy, memory and nature in plain, grave lyrical voices. Feels like melancholy, nostalgia and wonder. About morality, memory and nature.
- What should I read after A Shropshire Lad?
- If you liked A Shropshire Lad, try Poetry (John Keats), The Madman (Kahlil Gibran) and The Darling and Other Stories (Anton Chekhov).
A taste of the feed
A song that makes one night feel as old as the species.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Poetry · John Keats
The strange intimacy of the thing that keeps defeating you.
Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield, In your eyes I have read That to be enthroned is to be enslaved, And to be understood is to be leveled down, And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullness And like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed. Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion, You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences, And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings, And urging of seas, And of mountains that burn in the night, And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul.
The Madman · Kahlil Gibran
A sailor's love for the sea has fear in it; landsmen never understand.
We men hat go down for a livin’ in ships to the sea— We love it a different way from you poets that ’bide on the land. We are fond of it, sure! But, you take it as comin’ from me, There’s a fear and a hate in our love that a landsman can’t understand. Oh, who could help likin’ the salty smell, and the blue Of the waves that are lazily breathin’ as if they dreamed in the sun? She’s a Sleepin’ Beauty, the sea—but you can’t tell what she’ll do; And the seamen never trust her—they know too well what she’s done!
Poetry · Henry van Dyke Jr.
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