18 pages • 36 minutes read
A. E. HousmanA Shropshire Lad, Poem XXXVI
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1896A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
War defines the historical context of Housman’s poem. What is remarkable historically about The Shropshire Lad, Housman’s collection in which “Poem XXXVI” first appeared, is its emergence twice as a national best-seller. Seldom does a collection of poems find a mass market and become a best-seller. Even rarer does that same collection find its way to that level of success twice. Published initially at Housman’s own expense, The Shropshire Lad found little response. The poems, which recreated the bucolic world of rural England all but lost in the rise of industrialization, found little interest when they were first published in 1896. Some two years later, however, when England became embroiled in a turf war in distant South Africa, a conflict that came to be known now as the Boer War, the volume touched a cultural nerve. As England dispatched its young men and women to South Africa to defend an empire presence that centered less on noble ideals of God and country as it did on mercenary concerns over control of the region’s natural resources, particularly newly discovered reservoirs of diamonds, the poems spoke of a world all but lost to the modern era, a world of pastoral comfort and bucolic contentment. The poems were accessible, direct, reader-friendly. In addition, the poems, which dealt with themes of death at a young age and the tragic fall from innocence and the fleeting nature of love and the impermanence really of any significant emotion (all symbolically reflecting Housman’s own accommodations to his awareness of his sexual orientation, doomed by society’s restrictions), captured the mood of a nation struggling with the implications of sending off its best and brightest to a distant country to die for reasons that seemed less than glorious, more mercenary.
The poem’s historical context defines as well the British problematic involvement some 20 years later in the war between alliances in continental Europe, known as The Great War, or World War One, when once again a generation of young British men and women were dispatched to fight a war of at best ambivalent motivation. Given its investment in technology, World War One provided horrific evidence of the killing capacity of modern weaponry without providing any kind of noble goal to such brutality, thus giving emotional power to Housman’s collection of poems that with directness and without lavish poetic ornamentation or flowery language acknowledged how brief life could be, how fleeting love proves, and the inevitability of death. The collection’s pessimism, its sense of lost opportunities and ironic hope, found again a national audience. “Poem XXXVI,” for instance, could easily be read as the narrative of a young person heading off to an uncertain future as a soldier, clinging to the desperate hope that somehow, someway they might someday return.
Literary Context
Literary context here is tied to the poem’s title. Appreciating the literary achievement of something called “Poem XXXVI” inevitably raises the issue of how best to appreciate a single poem designed to be part of a collection of other poems, a poem that, although not linked by a single character or by a single narrative line of action to the other poems, was conceived as part of a broader argument. Like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Poems (1898), Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) or Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will (1915), all collections often compared to Housman’s, A Shropshire Lad was conceived as a collection of poems related by theme. Appreciating “Poem XXXVI,” or really any single poem in the collection, according to critical logic, would then be akin to trying to understand the human body by examining a single tooth. The title of the poem itself would indicate its contextual relevance would be tied to its place within that anthology.
A Shropshire Lad, despite its title, does not focus on the emotional or psychological evolution of a single character. Rather, the collection conjures an idyllic rural world lost to the stunning growth of industrialism and the concurrent rise in urban centers that defined Victorian England. Shropshire was in fact an agrarian district in western England, far from the country’s teeming urban centers. The poems nostalgically depicted a world of peaceful farmlands, rolling hills, and verdant fields, reflecting less Housman’s own experience (he was born and raised in a booming town) than it was informed by his academic investigations into the pastoral poets of Antiquity. Indeed, given that Housman did not in fact even visit Shropshire until long after the collection’s publication, Shropshire functions more as an imaginary construct where the poet, reeling from his own disastrous experience of frustrated love, could write poems that reflected the themes of lost love, the brevity of life, the reality of death, and the lack of the consolation of a Christian afterlife. Taken as a whole, then, the collection informs “Poem XXXVI” with a much darker mood then it conveys taken as a single poem. Anthologized as an individual poem, without its literary context, the poem might seem more hopeful, its yearning not so keen, not so bittersweet. Placed within the collection, with its marked pessimism, however, the poem reveals the desperation of the narrator’s hope, the emptiness of his logic, and the existential bleakness of his prospects for recovering the world he is leaving.
