A Shropshire Lad

About the book

Housman's sequence gives young men, soldiers, lovers, and remembered companions voices shaped by the knowledge that pleasure and life are temporary. Hills, lanes, blossoms, towns, and seasons provide clear outward forms for feelings that often turn suddenly towards loss. The poems' simple vocabulary and songlike measures make that turn especially striking: an apparently familiar observation can end by changing the emotional meaning of everything before it. The Shropshire setting is a poetic landscape rather than a continuous local history or one speaker's autobiography. Individual pieces can be read alone, but their recurring images and situations create a cumulative atmosphere. The collection asks what the awareness of an ending does to present beauty, holding tenderness, irony, and defiance within unusually concentrated lyric forms.

• Youth and mortality
• Memory
• Beauty and loss

Why read it

For lucid, musical poems whose apparent simplicity gives sudden recognitions of loss and transience exceptional force.

Poetry sequence · English text with an introduction by William Stanley Braithwaite