To an Athlete Dying Young

A. E. (Alfred Edward) Housman is the author of “To an Athlete Dying Young,” which is a part of his 1896 canonized collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad. Housman didn’t grow up in Shropshire, and he didn’t live in Shropshire, England, but he grew up in nearby Worcestershire. As the collection’s title suggests, the speaker of the poems is a lad or male but not necessarily Housman. At the same time, the poem arguably contains autobiographical elements, with “To an Athlete Dying Young” possibly alluding to Housman’s complex relationships with the scientist Moses Jackson and/or his younger brother Adalbert. Regardless of the potential autobiographical meaning, the poem expresses personal feelings about loss, so it qualifies as a lyric and an elegy. Its ornate diction and misty, melancholic presentation of human life make it a part of the later Romantic Movement and the Aesthetic Movement. The poem sends the message that renown and looks are fleeting, and it’s one of Housman’s most famous poems, along with other desolate poems in A Shropshire Lad like “With Rue My Heart is Laden” (1896) and “When I Was One-And-Twenty” (1896).