This is one of my favorite collections of poetry. I think I can recite more than half the poems from memory.
A Shropshire lad (Unabridged)
A. E. Houseman
Read by Samuel West
The book
A Shropshire Lad is a cycle of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman (26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936). Some of the better-known poems in the book are "To an Athlete Dying Young", "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" and "When I Was One-and-Twenty".
The collection was published in 1896. Housman originally titled the book The Poems of Terence Hearsay, referring to a character in the volume, but changed the title at the suggestion of his publisher.
A Shropshire Lad was first published in 1896 at Housman's own expense after several publishers had turned it down, much to the surprise of his colleagues and students. At first the book sold slowly, but during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Housman's nostalgic depiction of rural life and young men's early deaths struck a chord with English readers and the book became a bestseller. Later, World War I further increased its popularity. Arthur Somervell and other composers were inspired by the folksong-like simplicity of the poems, and the most famous musical settings are by George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams, with others by Ivor Gurney, John Ireland and Ernest John Moeran.
Housman was surprised by the success of A Shropshire Lad because of the deep pessimism and obsession with death throughout, with no place for the consolations of religion. Set in a half-imaginary pastoral Shropshire, "the land of lost content" (in fact Housman wrote most of the poems before visiting the county), the poems explore the fleetingness of love and decay of youth in a spare, uncomplicated style which many critics of the time found out-of-date as compared to the exuberance of some Romantic poets. Housman himself acknowledged the influence of the songs of William Shakespeare, the Scottish Border ballads and Heinrich Heine, but specifically denied any influence of Greek and Latin classics in his poetry.
The poems are :-
1. 1887
2. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
3. The Recruit
4. Reveille
5. Oh see how thick the goldcup flowers
6. When the lad for longing sighs
7. When smoke stood up from Ludlow
8. Farewell to barn and stack and tree
9. On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
10. March
11. On your midnight pallet lying
12. When I watch the living meet
13. When I was one-and-twenty
14. There pass the careless people
15. Look not in my eyes, for fear
16. It nods and curtseys and recovers
17. Twice a week the winter through
18. Oh, when I was in love with you
19. To an Athlete Dying Young
20. Oh fair enough are sky and plain
21. Bredon Hill
22. The street sounds to the soldiers tread
23. The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair
24. Say, lad, have you things to do
25. This time of year a twelvemonth past
26. Along the field as we came by
27. Is my team ploughing
28. The Welsh Marches
29. The Lent Lily
30. Others, I am not the first
31. On Wenlock Edge the woods in trouble
32. From far, from eve and morning
33. If truth in hearts that perish
34. The New Mistress
35. On the idle hill of summer
36. White in the moon the long road lies
37. As through the wild green hills of Wyre
38. The winds out of the west land blow
39. Tis time I think by Wenlock town
40. Into my heart an air that kills
41. In my own shire if I was sad
42. The Merry Guide
43. The Immortal Part
44. Shot so quick so clean an ending
45. If it chance your eye offend you
46. Bring, in this timeless grave to throw
47. The Carpenters Son
48. Be still my soul be still the arms you bear are brittle
49. Think no more, lad laugh be jolly
50. Clunton and Clunbury
51. Loitering with a vacant eye
52. Far in a western brookland
53. The True Lover
54. With rue my heart is laden
55. Westward on the high-hilled plains
56. The Day of Battle
57. You smile upon your friend to-day
58. When I came last to Ludlow
59. The Isle of Portland
60. Now hollow fires burn out to black
61. Hughley Steeple
62. Terence this is stupid stuff
63. I hoed and trenched and weeded
The author
Alfred Edward Housman (26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936), usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before 1900. Their wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and distinctive imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th century English composers (beginning with Arthur Somervell) both before and after the First World War. Through its song-setting the poetry became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.
Housman was counted one of the foremost classicists of his age, and has been ranked as one of the greatest scholars of all time. He established his reputation publishing as a private scholar and, on the strength and quality of his work, was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and later, at Cambridge. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius and Lucan are still considered authoritative.
The reader
Samuel Alexander Joseph West (born 19 June 1966) is an English actor and theatre director. He is perhaps best known for his role in Howards End and his work on stage. He also starred in the award-winning play ENRON. His parents are well-known television and theatre actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales.
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