09 (To an Athlete Dying Young Commentary)

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.

To an athlete dying young is a poem about a town, mourning the death of an athlete. The author uses an athlete because it gives the feeling of wasted potential. This adds more disappointment, as it makes you feel that the person could have had something happen in his life, but they won’t ever get the chance. To change the imagery in the poem, A. E. Housman has a great contract between the first quatrain and the second quatrain:

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,

(3-6)
He uses some of the same images, with the town’s people carrying the athlete, and in the second quatrain, they are carrying him through the town, but in a coffin. This shows how much different the town is once the person they look up to die.

On the technical side, A. E. Housman uses a dominant pattern of iambic tetrameter, meaning that there are 4 feet in each line, and they usually are iambic. each quatrain has a rhyming pattern of AABB, meaning that the first two lines rhyme, and the second two lines rhyme. He breaks the iambic tetrameter pattern to make it sound less robotic, and that allows the poem to sound more natural. Very few of the lines are enjambments, as most lines end in a comma or period. The poem also does not have any caesuras, as this would make the poem sound very choppy, and it would not have a good flow.