"To An Athlete Dying Young" is a poem in A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1896). It is characterized as a lyric poem and also an elegy. It is perhaps one of the best-known poems pertaining to early death; in this case, that of a young man at the height of his physical prowess. The setting is the funeral of a champion athlete, a young runner.
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Housman wrote the poem in 1896, perhaps inspired by the death of his close friend Adalbert Jackson in 1892. Published in the period between the two Boer Wars, the poem gained even more popularity during World War I, as many saw it as a poignant lament for the lost generation of so many bright, young men, cut down in their prime.
Text
The time you won your town the race,
We chaired you through the marketplace;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
As home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, 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 honours 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-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.
Commentary
The poem has been described as a "thought-provoking poem" with "beautiful imagery and rhyme scheme" which "makes the reader think about life and its meaning."
Part of the poem was read by the main character, Karen Von Blixen, at the funeral scene for her lover in the movie Out of Africa.