"Is My Team Ploughing" is a poem by A. E. Housman, published as number XXVII in his 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad. It is a conversation between a dead man and his still living friend. Towards the end of the poem it is implied that the friend is now with the girl he left behind when he died. In writing the poem, Housman borrows from the simple style of traditional folk ballads, featuring a question-and-answer format in a conversation.
The text, along with other poems from A Shropshire Lad, has been famously set to music by several English composers, including George Butterworth (Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad), Ralph Vaughan Williams (On Wenlock Edge) and Ivor Gurney. Vaughan Williams omitted the third and fourth verses, to Housman's annoyance, writing years later that he felt “a composer has a perfect right artistically to set any portion of a poem he chooses provided he does not actually alter the sense” of it. “I also feel,” he added, “that a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as: “‘The goal stands up, the Keeper / Stands up to keep the Goal.’”