A Shropshire Lad, Poem XXXVI

"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.