A. E. Housman’s “Poem XXXVI” (Poem 36), part of A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 short poems Housman published at his own expense in 1896, captures at once the thrill and the loneliness, the anticipation and uncertainty of the open road. The poem explores the peculiar mix of anxiety and expectation that defines leaving any place that has become familiar and comforting without the certainty of ever returning. Not specific enough to be a narrative, the spare poem, 16 tightly rhymed, tightly rhythmic lines (it has been set to music a number of times), conjures with lyrical simplicity the inevitable doubts that cloud a departure into the unknown and the emotional pull that draws the person back to stay where they know they cannot stay. The poem struggles to affirm that any road that leads away from a familiar place might someday, someway, sometime lead back again. The hope is faint, the feeling of the poem is darkly forbidding. A classically trained scholar and an academic by inclination, Housman (1859-1936) published only two volumes of poems in his lifetime. His contemporary reputation rests almost entirely on the achievement of A Shropshire Lad, his first volume and an improbable best-seller, which evoked the all-but-vanished life of rural England with melancholic yearning and wistful nostalgia.

Poet Biography

Alfred Edward Housman was himself born and raised in the town of Bromsgrove some two hours west of London, a booming marketing center known then as now for processing wool and manufacturing nails—ironic, given his reputation for capturing the sadness of the vanishing life of rural England. Early on, Housman, the oldest of seven children and growing up in relative middle-class comfort, read voraciously, drawn particularly to the myths and legends of Antiquity. In 1877, he matriculated in classical literatures at prestigious St. John’s College, part of the University of Oxford system. He proved an outstanding student, precocious and uncompromising. For Housman, his education, however, was upended as he struggled to come to terms with his sexual orientation, particularly his infatuation with a male classmate. Gay sexual orientations at the time were treated as a crime, punishable by imprisonment. He barely managed to complete his degree and after took a modest office job as a patent clerk in London where he worked for nearly 10 years.

He never abandoned his private study of the classics and was accepted in 1892 for a university teaching position in Latin at the University College in London. He remained at University College for more than 20 years, during which he composed the poems that make up The Shropshire Lad. When Housman could find no publisher interested in a cycle of poems that seemed at once accessible and lyrical and yet so mournful and melancholy, Housman published the collection at his own expense in 1896. Initially, the collection stirred little popular or critical reaction, but when England entered the Second Boer War (1899-1902), a war fought in distant South Africa, the poems, with their wistful evocation of the English rural life (ironic as Housman never actually visited the Shropshire district until after the collection was published) and their bittersweet reminders of the brevity of life and the ephemeral nature of love, found a wide market among the British middle class. That publishing phenomenon repeated when more than 20 years later England entered World War One, a grueling and brutal involvement on the European continent that stretched across nearly five bloody years.

In 1911, his reputation as a national poet secured, Housman accepted an endowed chair on the faculty at Trinity College as Professor of Latin, a post he retained until his death. During that time, Housman published several volumes of both translations of Latin poets and exegeses of landmark poems of Antiquity, securing his reputation as a scholar of immense range and erudition. Prickly and uncompromising in his work, Houseman decried the carelessness with which many contemporary Latin and Greek scholars had translated classical works and stressed the need for care and diligence in such translations. When in the early 1920s, Housman’s friend from his college days, the object of his love, was dying, Housman decided to gather poems he had worked on for years to present to his dying friend. Unlike A Shropshire Lad, Last Poems (1922) received wide critical acclaim for its range of themes and the subtlety of Housman’s poetic line. Despite the privilege of his celebrity, Housman seldom ventured from Trinity College, preferring the reclusive life of an academic and content to teach and publish works of scholarly intent. He seldom spoke publicly about his conceptions of the role of the poet, although he was emphatic in the single essay he published on the craft of writing poetry that poetry must foremost be emotional, not intellectual, that a poem must strike the heart, not stir the mind. When Housman died in 1936 at the age of 77, his ashes were interred in a small country churchyard in Ludlow in Shropshire.

Poem Text

White in the moon the long road lies,   

 The moon stands blank above;           

White in the moon the long road lies     

 That leads me from my love.

Still hangs the hedge without a gust,    

 Still, still the shadows stay:    

My feet upon the moonlit dust     

 Pursue the ceaseless way.

The world is round, so travellers tell, 

 And straight though reach the track,    

Trudge on, trudge on, ’twill all be well, 

 The way will guide one back.

But ere the circle homeward hies   

 Far, far must it remove:    

White in the moon the long road lies   

 That leads me from my love.

Houseman, A.E. “Poem XXXVI.” 1896. Poets.org.

Summary

It is night time. The moon hangs full above a winding country road. The moonlight bathes the lonely road in a rich white light that only makes it seem that much longer, that much lonelier. The narrator, never named, shares little about why he (she?) is on the road, why they are leaving, why they are walking away from a place familiar and reassuring. The narrator shares only that leaving is imperative. The narrator goes, he says in all but words, because he must. The spare detail the narrator does share is that he is leaving behind his love, again unnamed and unspecific (family? a lover? a friend? a spouse?) and, by implication, all the reassurance, stability, and comfort such an emotional commitment provides. The narrator gives no hint where the road goes, only that it takes him away. The poem offers a forbidding sense of displacement, a feeling that the narrator, in his heart, is leaving something of value behind and that ahead is only uncertainty.

In Lines 5 and 6, the narrator shares that the night itself is still, no wind disturbs the trees and hedges that line the road, a sense of stillness that contrasts to the narrator’s evident internal turmoil, that sense of uncomfortable alienation, a riot of emotions that go unspoken. He takes comfort in the quiet of the familiar rural countryside, at once stable and consoling. The only thing that disturbs the rural quiet are his feet, making their way along the winding dirt road. He does not hesitate, never stops, never looks back. His steps are “ceaseless” (Line 8). Without sharing the destination, the narrator leaves the impression of movement without direction, motion for its own sake, reflecting the dynamic of anticipation and dread that mark the departure from what he knows and who he loves.

Desperate to ease his troubled heart, the narrator struggles to reassure himself that the road that leads away from his love can someday lead him back. Indeed, he tries to be logical. He conceives of the world itself as round. That roundness affirms that any road away inevitably, invariably becomes the road back if it is traveled for a long enough time. Keep moving, he uses the onerous verb “trudge,” and inevitably the footsteps will find their way back home. “Twill all be well” (Line 11), he tells himself in an emotional effort to calm his mounting anxieties. All will be well, surely, nothing bad will happen, nothing will interdict a return to the familiar, the comforting, and the reassuring. The road that seems now to be so forbidding in its blankness, its openness, and its apparent endlessness will surely someday guide him back.

His “someday,” however, when the circle finally, at last closes and he returns is sometime off in the future. The narrator knows this, and after he decides in Stanza 3 to bravely reassure himself, he closes the poem by acknowledging what his heart struggles to accept, that the journey that is just beginning will be long, that his feet must travel “far, far” (Line 14). In this, the poem explores the tension between what his intellect understands and what his heart, tender and vulnerable, cannot quite bring itself to embrace. The journey away, in the end, does not, cannot guarantee the journey back. The poem ends with the image of the moon, far from the romantic moon of love poetry, now terrifying in its evident indifference to the narrator’s fears, casting the night and the long road ahead in unblinking, unyielding clarity. In the closing line, the narrator works to accept the stark reality of his departure, the loneliness of his travels, and the uncertainty of his fate.