A Shropshire Lad, Poem XXXVI

A. E. Housman’s “Poem XXXVI” (Poem 36), part of A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 short poems Housman published at his own expense in 1896, captures at once the thrill and the loneliness, the anticipation and uncertainty of the open road. The poem explores the peculiar mix of anxiety and expectation that defines leaving any place that has become familiar and comforting without the certainty of ever returning. Not specific enough to be a narrative, the spare poem, 16 tightly rhymed, tightly rhythmic lines (it has been set to music a number of times), conjures with lyrical simplicity the inevitable doubts that cloud a departure into the unknown and the emotional pull that draws the person back to stay where they know they cannot stay. The poem struggles to affirm that any road that leads away from a familiar place might someday, someway, sometime lead back again. The hope is faint, the feeling of the poem is darkly forbidding. A classically trained scholar and an academic by inclination, Housman (1859-1936) published only two volumes of poems in his lifetime. His contemporary reputation rests almost entirely on the achievement of A Shropshire Lad, his first volume and an improbable best-seller, which evoked the all-but-vanished life of rural England with melancholic yearning and wistful nostalgia.