For The Returning Dead...

Trying to get some cleaning done this morning, I came across one of the many books I use for scribbling my thoughts, songs and poems...

On a loose piece of green paper, I had written the words to a poem a number of years ago. The (abridged) poem was recited by Meryl Streep towards the end of the film Out Of Africa, which also starred Robert Redford, whose character had just died. I had transcribed the poem after watching a video of the movie, but I had trouble understanding one line.

With my rediscovery of the poem, it occurred to me to do a web search for the missing word(s). I found that the poem was written by Alfred Edward Housman, and that there exists a Housman Society, from whose website I copied the following biography.

ALFRED EDWARD HOUSMAN, poet and pre-eminent classicist of his time, was born near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire in 1859. The eldest of seven children he entered Bromsgrove School at the age of eleven and, with a strong academic grounding there, won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford in 1877. After gaining First Class Honours in Classical Moderations, he failed his 'Greats', the Final School, in 1881 and so left Oxford without a degree. After a brief time teaching at his old school he returned to Oxford for a term to take a pass degree and the following year took up employment in the Patent Office in London, where his great friend from Oxford days, Moses Jackson, was working.

In 1892, on the strength of scholarly articles published in classical journals, Housman was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London. In 1896 his most famous book, A Shropshire Lad, was published and it has never been out of print since. The 63 spare nostalgic verses, born out of the troubles Housman suffered during his life, are set in a half-imaginary Shropshire, a 'land of lost content', and the heart-penetrating simplicity of its verse has given it an enduring popularity.

The poem (dedicated here for those being brought home "shoulder-high" from war):

XIX. The time you won your town the race

To an Athlete Dying Young


The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And 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.