To an Athlete Dying Young

Housman organizes his poem into seven quatrains or stanzas of four lines. Each stanza consists of one sentence and follows an AABB rhyme scheme. The deliberateness of the form matches the considered tone of the poem. Housman purposefully uses irony to highlight the pressures of fame and the sadness of dying young. The speaker already knows the outcome of the athlete, and the form, too, is predetermined.

For meter, Housman uses tetrameter or four sets of unstressed, stressed syllables. In Line 1, the reader doesn’t stress “[t]he,” they stress “time,” they don’t stress “you,” but they stress “won,” and so on. The tetrameter creates a purposeful and somewhat slow place that links to the tragic irony and melancholy in the poem. The ups and downs of the meter reflect the ups and downs of life and the athlete, who dies with his glory intact but dies nonetheless and winds up in a “low lintel” (Line 23) or coffin.

Alliteration is the arrangement of words with the same first letter or similar sounds. The poet puts these words close together, and they make a pleasant melody.