Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
These are short songs about young men in the English countryside: farm boys who join the army, lovers who part, friends who die too soon. The tunes sound simple, almost like nursery rhymes, and then the last line lands like a bell in a church tower. Soldiers carried this little book into two world wars because it said true things about being young and not lasting.
Housman wrote most of these poems in a few months of 1895, while working at the Patent Office by day and building the classical scholarship career that would make him the most feared Latinist in Cambridge. When publishers declined the book, he paid for its printing himself in 1896. It sold slowly, then steadily, then enormously: the Boer War and the Great War put it in soldiers' pockets by the thousand.
The Lad is not really Housman, and the Shropshire of the poems is a country of the mind west of a Worcestershire childhood, but the voice became universal: a young countryman sings in ballad quatrains about recruiting sergeants, sweethearts, football, cherry blossom, and the gallows, always aware that lads grow old, or do not. 'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now' and the athlete dying young are the anthology pieces.
Braithwaite's introduction, from the 1919 American edition, opens our volume: period criticism, kept because it shows how the poems first struck America. The sixty-three poems themselves take less than an hour to read and years to forget, which is exactly the proportion Housman intended.
In 1896 A. E. Housman, a Latin professor who had failed his Oxford exams, paid to publish sixty-three short poems about Shropshire lads: soldiers, ploughmen, sweethearts, hangings, and early graves. The county was one he had barely visited, but the poems, clear as church bells and twice as sad, became the pocket book of a generation of young soldiers.
The first chapter
1887
From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,
The shires have seen it plain,
From north and south the sign returns
And beacons burn again.
Look left, look right, the hills are bright,
The dales are light between,
Because 'tis fifty years to-night
That God has saved the Queen.
Now, when the flame they watch not towers
About the soil they trod,
Lads, we'll remember friends of ours
Who shared the work with God.
To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night:
Themselves they could not save.
It dawns in Asia, tombstones show
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn's dead.
We pledge in peace by farm and town
The Queen they served in war,
And fire the beacons up and down
The land they perished for.
"God Save the Queen" we living sing,
From height to height 'tis heard;
And with the rest your voices ring,
Lads of the Fifty-third.
Oh, God will save her, fear you not:
Be you the men you've been,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
And God will Save the Queen.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1896. Author died 1936. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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