18 pages • 36 minutes read
A. E. HousmanA Shropshire Lad, Poem XXXVI
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1896A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
"Poem XXXV, The Shropshire Lad" by A. E. Housman (1896)
Considered a companion piece to “Poem XXXVI,” the brief lyric, reflecting Housman’s tight and sculpted meter and rhyme patterns, evokes the difficult moment when a young man departs home to go off to war. The poem makes specific what “Poem XXXVI” leaves open ended. The boy leaves behind his loving mother to follow the luring cadence of war drums.
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (1915)
Influenced by the success of Housman’s 1896 volume, although in free verse (reflecting the growing reach of Modernism), this collection, ostensibly poems narrated by the recently dead buried in the graveyard of a small rural Midwestern American town, speaks to Housman’s themes of mortality, the brevity of life, the inevitability of regret, the pain of lives wasted in quiet desperation, and the indifference of nature to humanity’s pitiable struggle for meaning.
Wessex Poems and Other Poems by Thomas Hardy (1898)
Similar in intent but far darker, more naturalistic in mood to Housman’s Shropshire collection, these brief evocative narrative lyrics, by a writer more known for his novels, summon up a nostalgic vision of England’s lost, if bleak and forbidding, rural world. They echo Housman’s themes of nature’s blind indifference, the speechlessly quick intrusion of death, the ache of memory, the cruel play of chance, and the inevitable souring of love.
Further Literary Resources
A.E. Housman, A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Christopher Ricks (1968)
Still considered the go-to reference work on Housman’s contemporary reputation, the volume’s essays on The Shropshire Lad are particularly drawn to exploring Housman’s reputed pessimism and how his handling of meter and rhyme, the music of his poetry, actually militates against the perception of his poetry as dour and dark.
Angry Dust: The Poetry of A. E. Housman by Oliver Robinson (1957)
The indispensable investigation into the complex relationship between Housman the man and Housman the poet. The book argues that in The Shropshire Lad Housman struggles against his own feelings of separation and isolation, his own increasing sense of existential alienation brought on by his crisis over his sexual identity, and his consequent endorsement of the figure of the angry rebel, the misfit who rejects rather than regrets his forfeited place in society.
"Housman’s Use of Classical Conventions" by Gerald Reedy (Victorian Poetry, 1968)
A sweeping investigation into Housman’s grounding in the poetry of Antiquity and his use of the vision and metaphors of that poetry in his own verse, this essay sees “Poem XXXVI” in particular as a summa expression of Housman’s debt to the classical Latin sensibility that regarded nature as both “mother and antagonist.”
Listen to Poem
Although individual recordings of individual pieces from The Shropshire Lad, including “Poem XXXVI,” are not readily available, there are numerous recordings available of the entire text.
Many of the poems in The Shropshire Lad have been set to music, most notably as orchestral idylls by early-20th-century British composers George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The musical themes reflect Housman’s own use of the traditional ballad form and his debt to the feel of rural nostalgia.
