A. E. Houseman's To An Athlete Dying Young

The poem “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Housman depicts the funeral of a young champion runner, who has died at the peak of his youth and athletic career. The poem makes note of the sorrow of a young life being cut short, but also glorifies the death of the athlete for capturing the young runner in the prime of his life. Housman’s poem was written in the form of the classical lyric poem, which could be influenced by Housman’s early tutoring in Greek and Latin lyric poetry (Holzberger 4). The poem also makes use of a four-line ballad stanza, which Housman forms into an elegy for the young runner as he reflects on the runner’s death (Holzberger 7). The use of symbols throughout the poem such as the

John Maloney’s “Good!” A short (14-line) poem incompasses the fast paced events within a Basketball game.It is limited third person from the perspective of a player that gained possession of the ball after a missed basket. The poet focuses the narrative onto the actions after the rebound occurred. The speaker of the poem, a player on the court, is focused on the game and the game alone, determined to keep the ball in his team’s possession and allow his team the chance to make a shot. Which in the end, he ends up taking the shot himself earning his team two points.

In literature, themes shape and characterize an author’s writing making each work unique as different points of view are expressed within a writing’s words and sentences. This is the case, for example, of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” and Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death.” Both poems focus on the same theme of death, but while Poe’s poem reflects that death is an atrocious event because of the suffering and struggle that it provokes, Dickinson’s poem reflects that death is humane and that it should not be feared as it is inevitable. The two poems have both similarities and differences, and the themes and characteristics of each poem can be explained by the author’s influences and lives.

In Yusef Komunyakaa’s brilliantly written poem,”Slam, Dunk, & Hook”, the author writes about boys playing a game of basketball with an emotional attitude. He calls the players,”beautiful and dangerous”, shows them changing throughout the poem, and uses a comma to separate the word “slam” from “dunk” to show what the actual focus of the game is. By the end of the game, the players become more advanced without knowing because of their determinations to get their emotions under control.

“Time has a wonderful way of showing us what really matters.” A.E. Housman grew up in a small town in Worcestershire, London. His childhood ended at the age of twelfth because his mother passed away. Then he went to this University where he fell into a dark love and made him depressed. He worked really hard and got a job as a professor at the University College in London. Although he does all of his teaching and helping scholars he is most known for his poetry. His poems display deep feelings and are emotionless. His poems usually affected the reader like a shiver down the spine or a punch in the stomach. I am going to be talking about three messages from the poem “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A.E. Housman.

In Edward Hirsch's poem Execution, the All-American sport of football is used to illustrate how a man's beloved high school football coach is matched up with his greatest opponent yet, something that play books and trick plays cannot defeat, cancer.

These help the poem or song flow better, sound more interesting, and keep the readers’ or listeners’ attention. “Glory” is a poem about young men who use baseball as an escape from their long, hard work days. When the men got done with work, they would go to an old baseball field and have fun and connect playing baseball. Although the

In his poem “To an Athlete Dying Young”, A.E. Housman makes a quite different approach on death. People have different perspectives on death, but more often than not, it is viewed as an undesirable event that people wish to avoid. The speaker in the poem, however, praises a young and famous athlete for dying before he became old and forgotten. This can be interpreted two very different ways. One can assume Housman believes that the only way for athletes to capture the glory is to die when at the peak of their careers. One might criticize him for having such a pessimistic view of life, but we must realize that we are among many people who give those athletes the feeling of disgrace as they are no

Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.

The literary masterpiece, “To an Athlete Dying Young,” uses figurative language, sound devices, and structure to illustrate a poem

Like any other eight year old boy, Hirsch loved sports, but he also fell in love with poetry. He found and read a copy of Emily Brontë’s “Spellbound” and loved it. As a child, he did not read a lot or really enjoy it, but through his mother’s coaxing with books about sports, he read. Hirsch’s grandfather helped develop his poetic skills. His grandfather wrote poetry but his was very unconventional because he wrote in Hebrew from

The power of the poet is not only to convey an everyday scene into a literary portrait of words, but also to interweave this scene into an underlying theme. The only tool the poet has to wield is the word. Through a careful placement and selection of words, the poet can hopefully make his point clear, but not blatantly obvious. Common themes of poems are life, death, or the conflicting forces thereto. This theme could never possibly be overused because of the endless and limitless ways of portraying life or death through the use of different words.

Mitch Albom’s novel Tuesdays with Morrie delves into the complexities of the human condition from the stand point of an elderly man that is slowly dying from the disease ALS, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The man, Morrie, decides to spend the last of his time on earth spreading his wisdom to as many people as possible, teaching them a lot about the importance of life, as well as what is necessary to live life to the fullest and be truly happy. What Morrie teaches these people is something great poets have been doing for a very long time. In the novel Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom expresses themes and ideas in everyday life that relate back to poetry and can be applied to one’s perspective of the human condition.

To An Athlete Dying Young is a poem written by A.E. Housman. It is projected towards older kids and up, as it has a deep meaning that most younger children wouldn’t be able to comprehend. The theme of the poem is that dying is not just going into a dark abyss. It says that dying is almost like arriving in a new home, or a new life. The fact is that although that person will be missed, he’s in a good place now.

The poem structure is an eight stanza quatrain with a rhyme scheme of ABCB. “Is football playing / Along the river shore, / With lads to chase the leather, / Now I stand up no more?” (Housman 9-12). Each stanza alternates between questions from the dead man and answers from his friend. Stanzas that are quoted represent the dead man’s questions. The stanzas without quotations are responses from the friend who is alive. Each stanza is significant because it reveals a little background of some of the things the dead man participated in.