Be still, my lad, and sleep.'Īs the reader has begun to suspect, two stanzas later the living man acknowledges:

'Ay, she lies down lightly, She lies not down to weep: Your girl is well contented. 'Is my girl happy, That I thought hard to leave, And is she tired of weeping As she lies down at eve?' Poem XXVII, ' Is my team ploughing?' is a dialogue between a dead youth and a friend who has survived him. Was never given in vain 'Tis paid with sighs a plentyĪnd sold for endless rue.' And I am two-and-twenty I heard him say again, 'The heart out of the bosom I heard a wise man say, 'Give crowns and pounds and guineasīut not your heart away Give pearls away and rubiesīut keep your fancy free.' But I was one-and-twenty, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations includes no fewer than fourteen of its sixteen lines: One of Housman's most familiar poems is number XIII from A Shropshire Lad, untitled but often anthologised under a title taken from its first line. For example, number IV, titled 'Reveille', urges an unnamed 'lad' to stop sleeping in the daylight, for 'When the journey's over/There'll be time enough to sleep.' The main theme of A Shropshire Lad is mortality, and so living life to its fullest, since death can strike at any time. Housman himself acknowledged the influence of the songs of William Shakespeare, the Scottish Border Ballads and Heinrich Heine, but specifically denied any influence of Greek and Latin classics in his poetry. Set in a half-imaginary pastoral Shropshire, 'the land of lost content' (in fact Housman wrote most of the poems before visiting the county), the poems explore the fleetingness of love and decay of youth in a spare, uncomplicated style which many critics of the time found out-of-date as compared to the exuberance of some Romantic poets. Housman was surprised by the success of A Shropshire Lad because of the deep pessimism and obsession with death throughout, with no place for the consolations of religion. Arthur Somervell and other composers were inspired by the folksong-like simplicity of the poems, and the most famous musical settings are by George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams, with others by Ivor Gurney, John Ireland and Ernest John Moeran. Later, World War I further increased its popularity. At first the book sold slowly, but during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Housman's nostalgic depiction of rural life and young men's early deaths struck a chord with English readers and the book became a bestseller.

A Shropshire Lad was first published in 1896 at Housman's own expense after several publishers had turned it down, much to the surprise of his colleagues and students.

A shropshire lad full text