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“TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG”
By: Gabriella Wolf
FAMILY LIFE
The eldest of seven children in a family was born in 1859 in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England
When he was twelve, Housman’s mother died
his death in 1936
SCHOOLING
Housman earned a scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, attended in 1877
He immersed himself in the study of classical languages, particularly Latin and Greek
He helped write a magazine
Housman excelled at his studies at Oxford
in 1879 he failed his final examinations
Housman returned home ungraduated and disgraced
though he returned to Oxford a year later and obtained a “pass” degree
INFLUENCE
Housman established a friendship with a classmate, Moses Jackson, that would have an enormous impact upon his life. Jackson was a good-looking, athletic young man with whom Housman fell hopelessly and permanently in love. Jackson rebuffed his friend’s affections, and Housman was heartbroken; many of his subsequent poems speak of unrequited love and refer to the rejection he suffered when he was “one-and-twenty
POETRY UNIQUE
four-beat-per-line Housman uses that pattern written in the form of a lyric ballad composed of seven quatrains, or stanzas of four lines
The poem is composed of seven quatrains, or stanzas of four lines each.
The rhyme scheme is aabb, which means that in each stanza the lines are all identical rhymes, except for lines 5 and 6, which is a slant or near rhyme
POETIC DEVICES
Assonace (stanza 5)
Imagary (stanza1-2)
Alliteration (stanza4)
POEM
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.
To-day, the road all runners come, 5
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
P O E M
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay, 10
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 15
After earth has stopped the ears:
POEM
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. 20
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.
POEM
And round that early-laurelled head 25
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.