Book description
This magical and poignant evocation of coming of age in the
countryside describes lovers in secluded lanes, cricket and church
bells, cherry trees hung with snow and woods full of bluebells. Yet in
A Shropshire Lad the fields and hills are also places of loss
and sorrow, where men die young or are sent far away to fight in
foreign wars. Aching with longing for a vanished world, these
exquisite verses are a meditation on the fleeting nature of love,
youth and happiness.
Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English
countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too. It has provoked a
huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and
people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are
travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long
tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the
countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's
relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the
countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).
A. E. Housman
(1859-1936) was born in the English countryside and felt affection for
it all his life. He worked as a clerk before becoming an esteemed Latin
scholar, but it was the publication of this, his first book of poems,
that would bring him lasting fame.
