Today’s Poem: To an Athlete Dying Young

A.E. Housman and the art of neatness

Ancient Greek athletes running, Corinthian amphora, c. 550 B.C. (Wikimedia Commons)

To an Athlete Dying Young

by A.E. Housman

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.

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This spring, Poems Ancient and Modern — under the title “Simple Is Hard” — looked at two brief poems by A.E. Housman (1859–1936): the miniature “With Rue My Heart Is Laden” and the epigram “Here Dead Lie We.” Along the way, we described Housman as what he obviously is: the gold standard of modern verse for poets with a formalist bent, since he makes it all seem so easy. 

Drawn from his 1896 book, A Shropshire Lad, “To an Athlete Dying Young,” is no exception. Perhaps Housman’s most-anthologized work, the poem is a masterclass in how to rhyme effortlessly and convey a thought with exceptional neatness. The thought itself is typical of Housman’s grim presentation of life and death and his cynicism about the tributes of the world. 

A.E. Housman in 1894 (Wikimedia Commons)

In seven quatrains formed from tetrameter couplets, “To an Athlete Dying Young” reads easy and goes down smooth. But its argument is that, for those who have achieved an early fame, it may be wise to die young: “Eyes the shady night has shut / Cannot see the record cut,” Housman says of his young athlete. “Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads that wore their honours out” — those lost older men, “Runners whom renown outran / And the name died before the man.”

The thought is not a particularly deep one, and it probably isn’t true. But it captures a mood — an errant notion that one would have to be less than fully human not to have had — about decline from the high points of life. It’s the theme of pop songs and movies about the lives of, say, high-school football stars after high school. Housman just does it better and more neatly.

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