In all of his poetry, Housman continually returns to certain favorite themes. Time and Death The predominant theme in Hous-man’s work, according to Cleanth Brooks, is that of time and the inevitability of death. As Brooks states, ‘‘Time is, with Housman, always the enemy.’’ Housman frequently deals with the plight of the young soldier, and he is usually able to maintain sympathy both for the youth who is the victim of war and for the patriotic cause of the nation. Robert B. Pearsall suggested in a 1967 essay that Housman dealt frequently with soldiers because ‘‘the uniform tended to cure isolation and unpopularity, and soldiers characteristically bask in mutual affection.’’

It is not only war but nature, too, that brings on thoughts of death in Housman’s poetry. In the famous lyric beginning ‘‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,’’ the speaker says that since life is all too short, he will go out ‘‘To see the cherry hung with snow,’’ a suggestion of death. In a well-known verse from Last Poems, a particularly wet and old spring causes the speaker to move from a description of nature—‘‘The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers stream from the hawthorn on the wind away’’—to a sense that his lost spring brings one closer to the grave. To his credit, Housman often does not merely wallow in such pessimistic feelings but counsels a kind of stoical endurance as the proper response: ‘‘Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.’’

The Hostile Universe Another frequent theme in Housman’s poetry, one that is related to the death motif, is the attitude that the universe is cruel and hostile, created by a God who has abandoned it. In the poem ‘‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’’ in Last Poems, mercenaries must take up the slack for an uncaring deity: ‘‘What God abandoned, these defended, / And saved the sum of things for pay.’’ R. Kowalczyk, in a 1967 essay, summed up this prevalent theme: ‘‘Housman’s poetic characters fail to find divine love in the universe. They confront the enormity of space and realize that they are victims of Nature’s blind forces. A number of Housman’s lyrics scrutinize with cool, detached irony the impersonal universe, the vicious world in which man was placed to endure his fated existence.’’

Furthermore, society sometimes intrudes into Hous-man’s world of nature, and when it does, his rustic youth frequently comes in conflict. As Oliver Robinson noted, ‘‘Housman is especially sympathetic with the man who is at odds with society, the man who cannot keep ‘these foreign laws of God and man.’’’

Works in Critical Context

The themes of his poetry and his emotional handling of them mark Housman as an extension of the Romantic movement that flourished in England in the early part of the nineteenth century and had a resurgence in the aesthetic movement of the 1890s. The critical evaluation of Housman’s work in the two decades after his death in 1936 is tinged with the anti-Romanticism of the period.

A Shropshire Lad As Maude M. Hawkins noted, A Shropshire Lad ‘‘sold so slowly that Laurence Housman at the end of two years bought up the last few copies.’’ Though the volume was better appreciated in the United States than in England, Hawkins called most of the critical reviews ‘‘lukewarm or adverse.’’ A Shropshire Lad did not sell well until it was published by Grant Richards, a man with whom Housman became lifelong friends. Richards’s first edition was five hundred copies in 1897, which sold out; he then printed one thousand copies in 1900 followed by two thousand in 1902. Hawkins summed up the volume’s early public reception: ‘‘After the slow stream of Housman readers from 1896 to 1903, the momentum of popularity increased rapidly.’’

During the twentieth century A Shropshire Lad has been more of a popular than a critical success. In accounting for this popularity, the writer George Orwell spoke of certain elements in the poetry: a snobbism about belonging to the country; the adolescent themes of murder, suicide, unhappy love, and early death; and a ‘‘bitter, defiant paganism, a conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young.’’

Responses to Literature

1. The speaker in ‘‘When I Was Young and Twenty’’ learns a lot in one year. List some more modern works that deal with similar coming-of-age themes and explain what the main character or speaker learns and at what cost. Does the similarity in theme constitute a similarity in the coming-of-age character? Does this universal theme that repeats itself throughout the generations continue to have the same face or does this theme present itself differently in modern times? Housman’s poetry examines the surprisingly short distance between youth and death. Being an atheist, he believed that life was fleeting and death final. Here are a few other works that explore similar ideas about the finality and inevitability of death.

The Seventh Seal (1957), a film directed by Ingmar Bergman. A medieval knight must play a tense game of chess with Death to determine the outcome of his life.

‘‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’’ (1951), a poem by Dylan Thomas. The speaker in this poem fiercely urges an unknown subject to ‘‘rage, rage against the dying of the light.’’

‘‘Ozymandias’’ (1818), a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s famous poem treats the subject of mankind’s pride and the eradicating forces of nature and time.

Death Be Not Proud (1949), a memoir by John Gunther. This book is about the author’s son, who died of a brain tumor at the age of seventeen.

2. Read ‘‘To an Athlete Dying Young’’ and determine whether Housman owes more to Greek mythology or to William Shakespeare. What elements in either Greek mythology or Shakespeare support your answer?

3. Using your library and the Internet, find out more about the typical characteristics of Victorianism and Romanticism in literature. In which camp do you think Housman’s poetry belongs? Why?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Books

Aldington, Richard. A. E. Housman and W. B. Yeats.

New York: Peacock Press, 1955. Bourne, Jeremy. The Westerly Wanderer: A Brief Portrait

Of A. E. Housman Author of ‘‘A Shropshire Lad’’

1896–1996. Bromsgrove, England: Housman

Society, 1996. Clemens, Cyril. An Evening with A. E. Housman.

Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1977. Graves, Richard Perceval. A. E. Housman: The

Scholar-Poet. New York: Scribner, 1979. Haber, Tom Burns. A. E. Housman. New York: Twayne,

1967. Hawkins, Maude M. A. E. Housman: Man Behind a

Mask. Washington, D. C.: Henry Regnery, 1958. Housman, Laurence. My Brother, A. E. Housman. New

York: Scribner, 1938. Ricks, Christopher, ed. A. E. Housman: A Collection of

Critical Essays. Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice

Hall,1968.

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