Poetry
A Shropshire Lad
Alfred Edward Housman · 1896
Opening lines
From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,
The shires have seen it plain,
From north and south the sign returns
And beacons burn again.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Sixty-three short pieces that return again and again to the same things. A twenty-year-old boy looks at a cherry tree in bloom and calculates that he has only fifty springs left in which to see it. A village athlete is carried home on his comrades' shoulders on the day of his victory, then on the day of his death. One boy leaves Ludlow to go and fight far away; another waits for dawn in Shrewsbury gaol. The same images recur from one piece to the next: the blue hills in the distance, the country one has left, the comrades who do not come home.
Context
The collection appeared in 1896 at its author's expense, after a publisher's refusal: sixty-three short poems in simple metre, about soldiers, boys who died young and a county that the writer scarcely knew. The print run was five hundred copies, and his brother bought up the last ones after two years. The author refused any royalty on sales so that the price would stay low. The collection enjoyed a sudden success in 1914, and these verses were carried into the trenches. Several English composers set them to music, among them George Butterworth, killed on the Somme in 1916.
Who it is for
Sixty-three short poems; in French, there is only a selection of the author's poems, translated in 2025.
Prizes and reception
Slow to sell when it appeared, it became some twenty years later the collection that soldiers took with them to the front.
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