Summary
In “To an Athlete Dying Young,” a rural speaker recalls the triumph of a local athlete, and contrasts that triumphant day with the same athlete’s early death. In the first stanza, he remembers how after he won the race on behalf of their town, they carried him aloft through the market square, while men and boys stood on all sides and cheered him on.
In the second stanza, the tense shifts to the present day. The athlete has died, and the townsfolk again carry him through the streets, now in his coffin. They bring him home and set him down, recognizing that he is now an inhabitant of the world of death, rather than their own town. In the third stanza, the speaker declares that the athlete was “smart” to escape a life of ordinary farm work in a world where fame quickly fades.
In the fourth stanza, he shifts to describing the experience of the corpse. The dead athlete’s blind eyes will be unable to see that his record has been broken. Unable to hear, he will not suffer when the crowd ceases to cheer for him. The fifth stanza continues in a similar vein, writing that, because he has died as a young man, the athlete will never have to join the ranks of runners who outlive the fame and honor they won in their youth.
In the penultimate stanza, then, the speaker encourages the athlete to embrace his death. He tells him to choose “the sill of shade,” or death, and to bring with him the trophy commemorating a victory that has not yet been surpassed. In the final stanza, the speaker writes that in the afterlife, the athlete will be worshipped by the dead. For them, the runner’s laurel garland (a sign of his victory) will never wither.
Analysis
“To an Athlete Dying Young” is one of Housman’s most famous poems. In style and subject matter, it’s quite similar to much of his other work. However, critics have been especially interested in “To an Athlete” because it undercuts the poet’s characteristically tragic subject matter and simple style with a layer of irony.
Housman’s career is something of a study in opposites. He was a professor of Classics at Cambridge, and was known for his ruthlessness and hostility as a scholar. His research principally concerned the famously dry and unemotional world of textual editing. Rather than interpreting Greek and Roman texts, he worked to reconstruct them. Classical texts survive only as hand-written manuscripts, and these usually differ from one another. Housman would compare these manuscripts with one another and work to create the closest approximation of what the original classical author intended.
His poetry, however, was famously emotive, even sentimental. Housman wrote that poetry should not attempt to be rational, and the poet’s focus shouldn’t be on generating meaning. Rather, poetry should speak directly to the emotions, and ideally transfer the writer’s feelings to the reader.
His first and most famous book of poetry, A Shropshire Lad, contains numerous poems about early deaths and youthful disappointment. Housman usually writes from the perspective of a rural narrator, whose naivete enables the poet to adopt a more innocent and immediate approach to tragic events.
However, Housman’s simple style tends to be at odds with his tragic material. Unlike earlier Romantic poets, who employ figurative language and rich imagery to play up the drama of their subject matter, Housman uses tight metrical schemes and holds himself to a limited vocabulary made up of short words. “To an Athlete Dying Young” perfectly embodies Housman’s characteristic style.
Look, for instance, at the first line, “The time you won your town the race.” The phrase employs exclusively mono-syllabic vocabulary. The meter is iambic, alternating between unstressed and stressed syllables. Because the vocabulary is so limited, the iambic meter is very prominent—read aloud Housman’s line, and compare the sound to that of this line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106, “And beauty making beautiful old rhyme.” Both lines use the same meter, but in Shakespeare the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables is tempered by the varying lengths of the words and the fact that some unstressed words (“old”) are still important to the line’s meaning. In “The time you won your town the race,” all the unstressed syllables are pronouns or articles—grammatical filler between the vital nouns. This makes the meter feel even louder.
The simplicity of Housman’s style has led many critics to identify a difference between the naive, rural speaker and the attitude of the poet himself, who comes off as more distant and measured in his attitude. That would line up with what we know of Housman as a scholar—in his work, his attitude approached that of the stoics, who sought to avoid all strong emotion.
Others have suggested that Housman’s simple style derives from his knowledge of the classics. Ancient Roman poetry also employed a stripped-down style to depict tragic topics. The critic Cyril Connolly wrote that Housman “introduced into English poetry the economy, the precision, the severity of that terse and lucid [Latin] tongue.” That style enabled the poet to keep a healthy distance from his subject matter, while still treating it with the intensity and focus it deserved.
Indeed, the first stanzas of “To an Athlete Dying Young” achieve a tragic effect not with emotional language, but rather in Housman’s use of poetic structure. The first two stanzas are written in careful parallel with each other. The first describes the athlete being carried in triumph through the town after winning a pivotal race. The speaker writes in the first person plural, emphasizing that the whole community celebrated the victory as a group. The lines efficiently summon up the sense of jubilation that filled the community, who felt that the athlete won his race not only for himself, but for their whole town.
The second stanza describes the athlete’s burial in similar terms. When the athlete won his race, he was carried aloft through the town as the bystanders cheered him on. Now, his coffin is similarly carried “shoulder-high” through the streets. Again, they bring him home, now dead rather than triumphant. The contrast with the previous celebratory scene heightens the pathos of the runner’s death, because it makes us feel just how starkly things have changed.
However, the rest of the poem is devoted not to the sadness of the youth’s death, but rather to the benefits of dying young. This cynical perspective differentiates “To an Athlete Dying Young” from some of Housman’s other poems, which could be more sentimental, and were sometimes even accused of being self-pitying. The speaker in “To an Athlete” is close to the story in that he’s part of the community, but he still adopts a wry and world-weary attitude when it comes to the runner’s death.
One important symbol in this second half of the poem is the laurel. In ancient Greece and Rome, a laurel wreath was conferred on those who won athletic events. Housman takes this object and uses the fact that it eventually withers as a symbol of the ephemerality of both life and fame. In the third stanza, he writes that although the laurel plant grows earlier in the year than the rose, it also dies sooner. That speaks to how short-lived fame can be, especially for athletes—sooner or later, someone would have broken the athlete’s record, and the cheers of the crowd would have faded into silence.
However, the comfort the speaker offers is somewhat cold. In the fourth stanza, he emphasizes that the athlete’s corpse will be blind and deaf to the loss of his fame. The athlete doesn’t get anything positive out of death; he merely avoids an inevitable loss of fame by losing his life first. The afterlife Housman describes is closed off from the world. There’s something pathetic about the runner holding up the “still-defended challenge-cup” in his coffin, while outside someone beats his record.
The final stanza further undermines the poem’s offer of consolation. It depicts the runner in an afterlife where he is flocked by “the strengthless dead.” Housman’s vision of the afterlife clearly derives from the ancient Greek afterlife, where people gradually faded into spirits. Housman is likely alluding specifically to the depiction of the world of the dead in the Odyssey. There, Achilles says to Odysseus that he would rather “live on earth as a hireling…than have sway among the dead that are no more.” The allusion suggests that the athlete’s experience of fame might be less desirable than the speaker suggests.
In the same poem, Odysseus lures the dead to his side by offering them the gift of strength. Housman’s dead flock to the recently deceased athlete because he still holds onto his own strength, and has the youth and vigor they lack. It’s a hollow fame, because it’s based on envy, and because eventually the athlete will become just as “strengthless” as all the dead men who surround him. Ironically, the fame he finds in death will be just as ephemeral as the worldly fame he escaped by dying. Rather than sweet comfort for a tragic death, the poem ends up being a bitter reflection on the impossibility of avoiding the loss incurred by the passage of time.
