1896 | England

Immortality

Housman’s elegy to an athlete dying young.

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the marketplace;
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 honors 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-laureled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Contributor

A.E. Housman

“To an Athlete Dying Young.” The promising Housman shocked tutors at Oxford University when in 1882 he failed his final exam, turning in mostly blank notebooks. It was an act that may have been caused by a mental breakdown, resulting from his unrequited love for an athletic peer who later served as the inspiration for various poems in his 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad.