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).

Poet Biography

A. E. Housman was born Alfred Edward Housman in Worcestershire, England, in 1859. He had six siblings, a jovial lawyer for a dad, and a mom who died of breast cancer when he was 12. Housman and his mom had a close bond, and her early death turned him into an atheist. He liked Latin and Greek and earned a scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he met the science scholar Moses Jackson. According to the literary critic Charles McGrath, Moses “was athletic and good-looking, bright enough, but something of a philistine” (“How A. E. Housman Invented Englishness.” The New Yorker, 19 June 2017).

In 1881, Housman failed his final examinations—perhaps his father’s faltering health distracted him. A year later, Housman became a clerk at the Patent Office in London. He worked in the same building as Moses, an Examiner of Electrical Specifications. Housman, Moses, and Adalbert shared a house, and scholars speculate Moses and Housman fought when Housman revealed his love for Moses. Laurence, Housman’s openly gay brother, believes Adalbert and Housman had some kind of physical relationship. In 1885, England passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which criminalized any sex between men. Housman’s desire for Moses, Adalbert, or any man put him and them in a precarious situation.

Adalbert died in 1892, and Moses married and started a family. He became the principal of a college in Pakistan and then moved to British Columbia and tried to be a farmer. Housman became a classics professor at University College, London, and then at Cambridge. Whatever happened between them, Housman and Moses maintained their friendship, and Moses made Housman the godfather to one of his sons. Moses died in Vancouver in January 1923, and Housman passed away in April 1936. There’s posthumous speculation Housman patronized male sex workers and had a tryst with a Venetian gondolier, but McGrath states that there’s “no sure evidence that Housman ever slept with anyone, and there’s little reason to doubt that Moses Jackson was his only real love.”

While alive, Housman only published two books of poems. In 1896, he put out A Shropshire Lad, which features “To an Athlete Dying Young.” The book didn’t make a big splash initially. By 1911, the English biographer Peter Parker says that “the average yearly sale was an astonishing 13,500 copies” (Housman Country, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016, p. 3). Composers set the poems to music, soldiers read the book during World War One, and literary figures like Willa Cather, George Orwell, and W. H. Auden praised the collection.

Around 14 years before his death, Housman released his second and last collection of poems, Last Poems. What occupied Housman wasn’t creative writing but scholarship. His magnum opus was an annotated edition of Astronomica—a poem spanning five books by the first-century Roman poet and astrologer Marcus Manilius. Housman’s first volume came on in 1903, and his fifth and final volume appeared in 1930, so Housman worked on his edition of Astronomica for 27 years.

Poem Text

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,

Shoulder-high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,

Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay,

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut

Cannot see the record cut,

And silence sounds no worse than cheers

After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,

The fleet foot on the sill of shade,

And hold to the low lintel up

The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Housman, A. E. “To an Athlete Dying Young.” 1896. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

As the title implies, Housman’s poem is about an athlete who dies young. The speaker addresses the athlete directly and reminds him of “[t]he time you won your town the race” (Line 1), and everyone in the town “chaired” or carried the athlete “through the market-place” (Line 2). People young and old “stood cheering by” (Line 3) as the speaker and the townspeople brought him home proudly or “shoulder-high” (Line 4).

The speaker switches to the present: “Today, the road all runners come, / Shoulder-high we bring you home” (Lines 5-6). All runners—and people—have to go down the road of death, so the people bring the famous runner to his “threshold” (Line 7) or on the cusp of the afterlife. They’re not celebrating the victorious athlete but marking his death, so the town is “stiller” (Line 8).

The speaker calls the athlete a “[s]mart lad” to “slip” away (Line 9). In his line of work, “glory does not stay” (Line 10). Concerning athletes and other figures in the public eye, the “laurel” or prestige can grow “early” (Line 11), but it vanishes or “withers quicker than the rose” (Line 12).

Now that the athlete is dead, he won’t have to “see the record cut” (Line 14) or witness the erosion of his reputation and accomplishments. The athlete won’t hear boos or disapproval because he’s going from “cheers” to “silence” (Line 15). The runner won’t add to the high number of “lads that wore their honours out” (Line 18). His prominence will remain intact.

As the athlete’s life is over, everything is “set” (Line 21) or settled. Yet dying young has possible downsides. The memory of the runner might “fade” (Line 21), so before people forget about the famous runner, the townspeople should pair the casket with his trophy—“[t]he still-defended challenge-cup” (Line 24).

The runner has a laurel or leafy crown around his head, and, due to his fame, people “flock to gaze” (Line 26) at his celebrated being. He’s “unwithered” (Line 27), and his crown is “briefer than a girl’s” (Line 28) or, perhaps, more ephemeral and elusive than female beauty.