Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
The "ill for mending" is his homosexuality, a factor shared by the poet, who also knows that society sees this as an ill and that it is not something that can be "repaired." The apparent admiration the poet expresses for the suicide might be seen as based on thoughts he may have himself had about suicide when he discovered his homosexuality and when that was rebuffed by his chosen target. Maude H. Hawkins writes that "Housman had been almost overwhelmingly obsessed with the desire to kill himself, but was saved from it by native courage and ambition" (164). Here, the poet writes about the process as if he had been through it and failed by drawing back, while he admires this young man who followed through:
Oh you had forethought, you could reason,
And saw your road and where it led,
And early wise and brave in season
Put the pistol to your head (5-8).
The language in this poem is the sort of simple and direct language for which Housman was noted.
Housman speculates about what later life would have been like for the cadet if he had not killed himself, and in so doing suggests what his own life has been like. He says that the cadet might later have done the same thing "After long disgrace and scorn" (10). He also hints at his own despair when he refers to the cadet as "The soul...
Housman also indicates that being homosexual in a society that despises the homosexual is a fate worse than death, a fate that he himself has lived. He says that the cadet has rightly seen what his future would be like and has chosen the better path:
Right you guessed the rising morrow
And scorned to tread the mire you must:
Dust's your wages, son of sorrow,
But men may come to worse than dust (13-16).
In other words, the cadet has seen "the mire" that would mark his life in the future and has decided to forego it and to take his own life.
Housman writes here about an event involving someone other than himself, but he draws on his own experience as he shows why this story attracted his attention and how he reacts top it because he has been in a similar position. His own understanding colors his reaction and also make the poem more powerful.
Works Cited
A.E. Housman Biography." Famous Poets and Poems.com (2007). August 29, 2007. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/a__e__housman/biography.
Hawkins, Maude M.A.E. Housman: Man behind a Mask. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958.
Reed, J.D. "Dual Nature." Time (28 July 2007). August 29, 2007. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922100-1,00.html.
Works Cited
A.E. Housman Biography." Famous Poets and Poems.com (2007). August 29, 2007. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/a__e__housman/biography.
Hawkins, Maude M.A.E. Housman: Man behind a Mask. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958.
Reed, J.D. "Dual Nature." Time (28 July 2007). August 29, 2007. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922100-1,00.html.
" These lines are a clear reference to how Housman felt about his homosexual lifestyle, for after his appointment in 1892 as professor of Latin at University College in London, Housman became "convinced that he must live without love" which drove him to become "increasingly reclusive" as a Latin scholar and poet ("A.E. Housman Biography," Internet). Also, Housman makes it quite evident that without love (in this case, the love
Thus only innocence in Brooks' poem is in relation to the likely readers. The innocent person is the naive reader, who might hope that things could be different for the students, or who thinks that the students' lives of petty criminality and sensual pleasures seem attractive, in contrast to a middle-class existence. This is not the case, advises Brooks, stressing her theme of thwarted and ignored promise with spare yet
Victorian literature was remarkably concerned with the idea of childhood, but to a large degree we must understand the Victorian concept of childhood and youth as being, in some way, a revisionary response to the early nineteenth century Romantic conception. Here we must, to a certain degree, accept Harold Bloom's thesis that Victorian poetry represents a revisionary response to the revolutionary aesthetic of Romanticism, and particularly that of Wordsworth. The
The line breaks in this poem are sudden and create a mood of suspense because the reader must move to the next line to read the rest of the story. When the poet begins counting, we have a sense of something dreadful about to occur. The rhyming in this poem is also effective in that the rhyming words are strong and visual. In the last stanza, the words "luck"
Human Suffering in the Works of W. Faulkner, S. Plath, T. Roethke, and W. Shakespeare Literature is considered as one of humanity's powerful medium of expression. Different forms of expression are used in literature, such as poetry, plays, novels, and short stories. As a medium of expression, literature becomes the primary vehicle in expressing the human experience. Take as an example the theme of human suffering in literature. Numerous poems
As activists in women's liberation, discussing and analyzing the oppression and inequalities they experienced as women, they felt it imperative to find out about the lives of their foremothers -- and found very little scholarship in print" (Women's history, 2012, para. 3). This dearth of scholarly is due in large part to the events and themes that are the focus of the historical record. In this regard, "History was