A Shropshire Lad
Composers began setting the poems to music less than ten years after their first appearance, and many parodists have satirised Housman's themes and poetic style.
Its popularity increased thereafter, especially during World War I, when the book accompanied many young men into the trenches but it also benefited from the accessibility that Housman encouraged himself.
[2] Housman later repeated the claim made in the final poem of the sequence (LXIII) to have had a young male readership in mind.
[4] They responded to Housman's lament for the transience of love, idealism and youth in what was in essence a half-imaginary pastoral countryside in a county only visited by him after he had begun writing the poems.
This was Murray's Handbook for Shropshire, Cheshire and Lancashire (originally published in 1870), in which is to be found the jingle with which poem L opens, Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun, Are the quietest places Under the sun.
[8] In the letter to Pollet already mentioned, Housman pointed out that there was a discontinuity between the Classical scholar who wrote the poems and the "imaginary" Shropshire Lad they portrayed.
"No doubt I have been unconsciously influenced by the Greeks and Latins, but [the] chief sources of which I am conscious are Shakespeare's songs, the Scottish Border ballads, and Heine."
It is not a connected narrative; though the "I" of the poems is in two cases named as Terence (VIII, LXII), the "Shropshire Lad" of the title, he is not to be identified with Housman himself.
The collection begins with an imperial theme by paying tribute to the Shropshire lads who have died as soldiers in the service of The Queen Empress, as her golden jubilee (1887) is celebrated with a beacon bonfire on Clee Hill (I).
These two poems were suggested by a report on the death of a naval cadet in August 1895 who had left behind him a letter mentioning these reasons for taking his own life.
[13] The strong combination of emotional feeling, lyricism and folk qualities contributed to the popularity of A Shropshire Lad with composers.
[18] There are six songs in Ralph Vaughan Williams' On Wenlock Edge (1909) in settings which include piano and string quartet; there was also an orchestral version in 1924.
The revised work was eventually published in 1954 as Along the Field: 8 Housman songs; in the meantime, "The Soldier" (XXII) was dropped and two more added from Last Poems.
[22] Butterworth was killed during the war, but towards the end of it Ivor Gurney was working on the songs in his cycle, Ludlow and Teme (1919),[23] and later went on to compose the eight poems in The Western Playland (1921).
Several were from the US, including Samuel Barber, who set "With rue my heart is laden" (as the second of his "3 Songs", Op.2, 1928), David Van Vactor, Ned Rorem, and John Woods Duke.
[21] One of the most recent is the Argentinian Juan María Solare's arrangement of poem XL for voice and drum, titled "Lost Content" (2004).
[31] The example of rather traditional woodcuts was also taken up in the US in the Peter Pauper Press edition (Mount Vernon, NY, 1942) with its 'scenic decorations' by Aldren Watson (1917–2013); that too saw later reprintings.
Included among these were Cyril Asquith's 12 Poems from A Shropshire Lad (Oxford 1929) and those by L. W. de Silva in his Latin Elegiac Versions (London 1966).
[35] The repeated mannerisms, lilting style and generally black humour of Housman's collection have made it an easy target for parody.
The first to set the fashion was Housman himself in "Terence, this is stupid stuff" (LXII) with its humorously voiced criticism of the effect of his writing and the wry justification of his stance in the tale of Mithridates.
[37] In the same year Rupert Brooke sent a parody of twelve quatrains to The Westminster Gazette (13 May 1911), written on learning of Housman's appointment as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge University.
"[41] The second by Kingsmill keeps equally closely to Housman's themes and vocabulary and has the same mix of macabre humour: 'Tis Summer Time on Bredon, And now the farmers swear: The cattle rise and listen In valleys far and near, And blush at what they hear.
Written in 1939, its humour is equally black and critical of Housman's typical themes: When lads have done with labour In Shropshire, one will cry, "Let's go and kill a neighbour," And t'other answers "Aye!
"[44] A new context is also found for Housman's celebratory tone as "Loveliest of cheese, the Cheddar now" by Terence Beersay, a pseudonym claimed to conceal "a literary figure of some note" in the preface to an 8-page booklet titled The Shropshire Lag (1936).
is more of "an admiring imitation, not a parody," and reproduces the effect of Housman's mellifluous rejoicing in nature and skilful versifying: Flame the westward skies adorning Leaves no like on holt or hill; Sounds of battle joined at morning Wane and wander and are still.
This will only work when both are equally well known, as is the case with Louis Untermeyer's subversion of heterosexual relations between Shropshire youth in "Georgie, Porgie, pudding and pie fashioned after A.E.
Since Housman's ashes were interred at St Laurence Church, Ludlow, it was visited in 1996 by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the centenary of A Shropshire Lad.
