Elegy--Angela Maske

To An Athlete Dying Young

by A.E. Housman

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.

The three elements of elegy are: 1) grief and sorrow 2) praise and admiration of the dead, and 3) solace. Housman begins with a tone of melancholy and nostalgia of the days of glory of the athlete, and subtly transitions into praise, and finally ends with a feeling of consolation in the last two stanzas. To some extent, Housman romanticizes the subject's death by saying he was a "smart lad" to die before "[the name's] echoes fade," and in this way is able to end on a less sad note. This implies that Housman values even posthumous fame more than having "the name die before the man." And so after reading this poem, we must come to terms with what we each cherish more--enduring life, or enduring glory.