Poem Analysis: To An Athlete Dying Young

"To an Athlete Dying Young" is one of Housman's regularly anthologized poems. Its peaceful, despairing tone, its topic of the solace of death, and its effortlessness of structure and style join to make the poem an exemplary festival of discharge from the challenges of life. In this short requiem, composed upon the passing of a youthful, praised competitor, Housman progresses the thought that it is obviously better to kick the bucket in one's prime, while one can be associated with his or her energetic achievements, than to wind up decrepit, overlooked, disregarded, or supplanted in the recollections and hearts of one's townspeople. With the run of the mill confined, perceptive tone regularly utilized by Housman, the speaker hails the dead youth

as a

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay....

Actually speaking, "To an Athlete Dying Young" is characteristic of Housman's endowment of graceful specialty. The even meter and the tight rhyme add to the planned, solemn, intelligent temperament built up from the first stanza forward. What's more differentiating images and pictures, the triumph parade and the memorial service cortege, the tree and the rose add multifaceted nature to a misleadingly straightforward poem. The poem finishes up with the projection of what the speaker sees as triumph for the dead youthful competitor, now a "Townsman of a stiller town"

And round that early laureled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Thus, Housman demands that passing, particularly for youth, is a triumph over the approaching troubles, tragedies, and catastrophe that go with life.