The highs and lows of this classic collection of sixty-three poems are arguably best read through a twenty-first century queer lens. Actually, though, the more I read A Shropshire Lad, the darker it gets. Many of the poems have an obvious metrical clunkiness (see ‘XXI Bredon Hill’) and are often seasoned with sentimental feeling (see the first poem ‘1887’ for celebrations of Queen & Country). There are both rural scenes – ‘oh see how thick the goldcup flowers / are lying in the field and lane’ – and urban imagery: ‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow, / And mist blew off from Teme’. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad has come to represent quintessential ideas of Englishness. Cinema does poetry a great favour in this respect: a fragment quoted lodges in the brain. I caught myself repeating: ‘’twas the Roman, now ’tis I’ without knowing what it meant. A middle-aged, wheezing English teacher, who is both relic and rebel, quotes in part reverie, part depressed mood: I partially recall A Shropshire Lad’s thirty-first poem, ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’, because it’s in a cinematic adaptation of Alan Bennet’s The History Boys (2006).
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