Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
In the second stanza, Housman depicts death as a place someone can enter. At first, the lines describe only the physical reality of the scene. The townspeople carry the boy’s body through the streets, just as they carried him through the market square after his victory. In the latter scenario, they brought him back to his house in town. Now, however, they deliver him to a “stiller town,” or to the afterlife. The physical act of carrying the corpse thus shifts to the metaphorical act of giving the boy up to death. In this context, the word “threshold” is ambiguous, because we’re not sure how literal Housman is being. It could refer to the grave, the threshold between air and ground. It could also refer to the conceptual boundary between life and death. For now, the recently deceased boy is still a part of the community, but he is soon brought to the “threshold.” Soon, he will step over and leave their world for good.
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.
In the third stanza, Housman develops the symbol of the laurel. In classical times, the laurel wreath was a symbol of athletic victory. Housman treats the symbol more pessimistically. The laurel grows “early;” in other words, the young are most likely to win athletic valor. Yet that very earliness means that the laurel also withers more quickly than the other plants in the garden. Housman thus uses the laurel’s pre-existing association with fame to symbolize the short-lived glory of youth.
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.
In the penultimate stanza, the speaker offers direct advice to the runner. Building on the architectural metaphor in the second stanza, he again depicts death as a place that can be entered. Now, however, the runner cannot rely on the community to deliver him into death, but rather must take the step himself, before his fame fades from memory in this life. The speaker’s point is that when the runner is dead, his victory will be permanent, because he will be unable to see it overshadowed. Yet the images of a windowsill and a “lintel,” or the strip of wood at the top of a door or window, are both associated with liminal spaces, or boundary zones. It would be pretty precarious to stay poised forever at that boundary, and so the image tacitly suggests that the runner’s fame when he dies will not be as stable as the speaker claims.
