To an Athlete Dying Young is a poem by the British poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman. It was published in A Shropshire Lad (1896), the poet’s first and most famous collection. A Shropshire Lad gathers together 63 short lyrics that are written largely in imitation of the pastoral style of the ancient Greek poets. Pastoral literature typically tells of the idealized life of shepherds and shepherdesses. More widely, the term applies to verse that glorifies rural life and even uses it as a contrast to contemporary life for the purposes of social commentary.
Housman’s “Shropshire” is more a creation of the imagination than a real place, although the unitary authority does exist in the west of England. His stories are not happy country idylls, but darkly pessimistic tales of death and sorrow. His themes are the temporary nature of beauty and love and the inevitability of human suffering. These melancholy ideas are expressed in series of tightly constructed, lyrical, and often exquisitely written pieces.
“To an Athlete Dying Young,” like most of the Shropshire poems, is written in a ballad form. A ballad tells a story, usually about a single person, in a series of stanzas of four lines each. Here the ballad form is used to present an elegy (formal lament for the dead) for a young village runner.
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. To-day, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. 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. Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears: 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. 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. 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.
This poem was one of the best examples of Housman’s adaptation of classical ideals to his own poetry. “To an Athlete Dying Young” focuses on the sorrow of a young life cut short. But it also glorifies a death that has captured youth for eternity. Unlike the lads who “wore their honours out” and will die old and forgotten, this athlete will be remembered as a hero. His laurels will therefore be eternal, and the poem itself has helped to make this so.
Housman denied the influence of the classical poets on his verse. But critics have frequently pointed to the classical elements of formal precision, economy of expression, and a frequent moral of stoicism (studied indifference to pain and pleasure). Housman’s dark pessimism is almost always tempered by the formal beauty of his poetry. His grim insistence on humanity’s unhappiness, expressed with pleasing rhymes and rhythms, has frequently been ridiculed. But many critics today emphasize this contrast, suggesting a powerful and effective tension between Housman’s dark message and the music of his poetry.
A. E. Housman completed another collection of poems 26 years after the publication of A Shropshire Lad. Three more volumes of his poems were published after his death. But none of these has ever achieved the popularity or the critical acclaim of his first collection.
For more information on Housman, see Housman, A. E.
