A Shropshire Lad, Poem XXXVI

War defines the historical context of Housman’s poem. What is remarkable historically about The Shropshire Lad, Housman’s collection in which “Poem XXXVI” first appeared, is its emergence twice as a national best-seller. Seldom does a collection of poems find a mass market and become a best-seller. Even rarer does that same collection find its way to that level of success twice. Published initially at Housman’s own expense, The Shropshire Lad found little response. The poems, which recreated the bucolic world of rural England all but lost in the rise of industrialization, found little interest when they were first published in 1896. Some two years later, however, when England became embroiled in a turf war in distant South Africa, a conflict that came to be known now as the Boer War, the volume touched a cultural nerve. As England dispatched its young men and women to South Africa to defend an empire presence that centered less on noble ideals of God and country as it did on mercenary concerns over control of the region’s natural resources, particularly newly discovered reservoirs of diamonds, the poems spoke of a world all but lost to the modern era, a world of pastoral comfort and bucolic contentment.