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.