Shropshire Lad - Themes and Style

Themes and Style

The main theme of A Shropshire Lad is mortality, and so living life to its fullest, since death can strike at any time. For example, number IV, titled "Reveille", urges an unnamed "lad" to stop sleeping in the daylight, for "When the journey's over/There'll be time enough to sleep."

One of Housman's most familiar poems is number XIII from A Shropshire Lad, untitled but often anthologised under a title taken from its first line. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations includes no fewer than fourteen of its sixteen lines:

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

Poem XXVII, "Is My Team Ploughing" is a dialogue between a dead youth and a friend who has survived him. The dead youth asks:

"Is my girl happy,
That I thought hard to leave,
And is she tired of weeping
As she lies down at eve?"

The living replies

"Ay, she lies down lightly,
She lies not down to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
Be still, my lad, and sleep."

As the reader has begun to suspect, two stanzas later the living man acknowledges:

"I cheer a dead man's sweetheart.
Never ask me whose."

Poem LXII, "Terence, this is stupid stuff", is a dialogue in which the poet, asked for "a tune to dance to" instead of his usual "moping melancholy" verse, offers the example of the old King Mithridates who tasted a little of every poison until he inured himself to them all. Similarly, Housman advises the speaker that it is wise to occasionally contemplate and encounter the less-than-merry side of life.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.

Read more about this topic:  Shropshire Lad

Famous quotes containing the words themes and/or style:

    In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.
    Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)

    There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
    Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)