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.
Themes
The Uncertainty of Life
The poem takes place at the intersection of the familiar and the new, the known and the unknown. It is at once exhilarating and terrifying. Given that the poem takes place on the threshold of some unnamed and nonspecific adventure, “Poem XXXVI” sustains an uneasiness over what that adventure might entail. The narrator never shares significant specifics about his departure, only that he is leaving a place that has come to be a reassuring environment and a person he defines as his love. The poem develops a sense of forward motion, the footsteps moving resolutely if uncertainly away from home and through the dust of the country road but not heading toward a specific destination. That creates in the poem its sense of uncertainty. Yes, the possibility of leaving the familiar can create a feeling of heightened expectation, even anticipation of a new adventure, a new world opening up.
The poem, however, refuses to invest the movement away from the familiar with anything but a cloaking feeling of heightened concern. The dilemma, underscored in Stanza 3 in the debate between the head and the heart, gives the poem its sense of universality. This is more than a coming-of-age poem about a young man off to find fortune in the city, more than a narrative of a young man off to the presumed adventure of war in some foreign land leaving behind his girl, more than a story of a young man uncertainly abandoning a rural life that can no longer sustain expectations. It is at once none of these and all of these. The poem comes down to footsteps moving more away from than toward anything. That uncertainty gives poem as a single composition (that is apart from the collection in which it first appeared) both its sense of expectation and anxiety.
The Dark Logic of Hope
The poem argues that people cannot live with a hope that is itself ironic. The poem is a contested narrative: even as the narrator departs, he struggles to find a reason, a strategy to believe that the world he is leaving can somehow be sustained, can somehow defy the evidence all around him of a world in perpetual evolution. The poem’s critical third stanza is a kind of dialogue between the heart and the head, a game attempt by the intellect to calm the anxieties of a heart in turmoil, uneasy over the decision to move away from the familiar and away from the consolations of a significant other. As a coming-of-age narrative, that is a threshold narrative in which the narrator, presumably young or at least naïve and untested, is departing the familiar and heading into the new, the poem struggles to find a vocabulary, a logic to hope that this move into uncertainty will be rewarding. The best logic here is that, given that the earth is round and that any path marked on a round surface leads inevitably back to the starting point, the world the narrator has known, including his love, will be waiting for him when his footsteps finally return him to that world. It is a desperate ploy, a strategy of hope that struggles to find some reassuring sense of stasis and stability in a world that is, obviously, always turning, always changing. Thematically, then, the poem inevitably finds its way to a bittersweet sense of hope, the hope for continuity in a world that is in constant turmoil, incessant flux, a world that renders stillness itself, a key term in Stanza 2, at best ironic, at worst tragic. In the poem’s closing two lines, a kind of refrain, the narrator appears to recognize the desperate nature of the hope he struggles to find. As the poem closes, the narrator, stark in the hard light of the unfailing moon, sees what his heart resists accepting, hope is the heart denying the intellect, the emotions resisting the implications of reality.
The Indifference of Nature
“Poem XXXVI” is at its heart a nature poem. As a second-generation Romantic, Housman uses for thematic effect the natural world. He is hardly a hardcore romantic nurtured by the green world rapidly disappearing as England’s industrialization spread. Born and raised in a market town thriving as a center for industrial production, Housman was enough of a classics scholar to appreciate the thematic implications of nature as explored within the pastoral vision of Greek and Latin poets. For Housman, nature was hardly a source of consolation or comfort. The natural world here isolates the narrator even as he is undergoing his own emotional trauma, even as he moves through and away from the rural world he knows. Nature, represented by the cold, clear, white light of the moon and by the still hedges that line the country road the narrator follows, underscores the narrator’s existential alienation. The moon is no comfort, the hedges no inviting bucolic friend. The moon reveals what the narrator’s heart resists: The road is long and leads away. The hedges that line the dirt road, impassive and still in the moon’s harsh light, their brush unmoving, reveal what the narrator’s heart struggles to render comforting: Nature is decidedly indifferent, impassive, to the emotional upheavals of humanity. Nature endures, people come and go. The narrator is unable to impose upon the natural world the consolation of the Judeo-Christian tradition in which the travails and challenges of life point toward the rewards of an afterlife. Here the natural world is exactly what a generation of scientists before Housman had defined, a complex world governed nevertheless by predictable laws of action and reaction, an enduring matrix of physical phenomena driven by causality and tempered by the absolute reality of death that is itself little more than a completely predictable cessation of those same critical biological processes—not much there in which to find the stuff of hope.
