1 h 1 minAudiobook10 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · 32 pagesHardcover · 6 × 9 in · 32 pagesAbout this book
What if the loveliest spring blossom reminds you how little time you have?
In A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman gathers sixty-three short lyrical poems around youth, longing and the English countryside. A young speaker looks across a Shropshire of hills, ploughed fields and village fairs. Love fails, friends die young, and the land stays beautiful while people pass.
Plain words, clear rhymes and steady rhythms give these poems their music. The cherry-tree poem sets spring blossom against life's brevity; elsewhere, red-coated soldiers march through village streets, and a storm shakes the trees on Wenlock Edge. Church bells and graveyards share this landscape with a calm, dry humour that sharpens its sorrow.
What you’ll discover
- Spring and passing youth Look at cherry blossom with a speaker who knows that beauty cannot make time stop.
- Love without easy comfort Meet young people whose longing survives rejection, faithlessness and the loss of those they love.
- Soldiers on village streets Watch red coats pass through rural life, bringing thoughts of sacrifice and early death.
- A landscape that endures Walk among hills and fields whose lasting beauty makes human lives feel brief.
- Music in plain words Discover how short stanzas, clear rhyme and steady beats carry sorrow without elaborate language.
Who will love it
For readers who love short, musical poems that are easy to remember, the English landscape and the ache of lost youth.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A London clerk invents a country
- Spring is lovely, and life is short
- Love goes wrong and friends die
- Soldiers march and young men die
- The land of lost content
- How to read these poems aloud
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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A Shropshire Lad
by A. E. Housman · 1896
Among cherry blossom and church bells, a young countryman faces love, loss and the brief beauty of youth.
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In short
A Shropshire Lad is a book of sixty-three short poems by the English scholar A. E.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A London clerk invents a country
Alfred Edward Housman was born in 1859 in Worcestershire, the eldest of seven children. As a boy he could see the Shropshire hills to the west, and they looked to him like a distant, lost land. He studied classics at Oxford, but he failed his final examinations, a blow that shaped his private life. He then took a post at the Patent Office in London and worked on Latin texts in his spare hours. His scholarship won him a professorship at University College London, and later at Cambridge.
The poems came to him in bursts during the 1890s. Housman said later that many arrived almost whole, often during walks. He had been through painful years. He loved a close Oxford friend, Moses Jackson, who could not return that love in the same way. A strong sense of exclusion, and of feelings that could not be spoken openly, runs below the book.
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What is A Shropshire Lad about?
It is a book of sixty-three short poems about a young countryman and the people around him. It deals with love that fails, early death, soldiers, the changing seasons and a longing for a lost, beautiful homeland.
Did A. E. Housman live in Shropshire?
No. He was born in Worcestershire and lived mostly in London and Cambridge. He saw the Shropshire hills from a distance as a boy, and the county in the poems is partly imagined.
When was A Shropshire Lad published?
It appeared in 1896. Housman paid for the printing himself. It sold slowly at first, then grew popular, especially during the Boer War and the First World War, when soldiers and families found comfort in it.
The author
A. E. Housman
1859–1936 · English poet and classical scholar
A. E. Housman (1859–1936) was an English classical scholar and poet whose slim collection A Shropshire Lad — with its doomed lads, rolling hills, and quiet heartbreak — became one of the best-loved books of English verse. He wrote it while working as a professor of Latin.
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