18 pages • 36 minutes read
A. E. HousmanA Shropshire Lad, Poem XXXVI
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1896A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Moon
The poem uses the symbol of the moon ironically. The poem, or more specifically the narrator’s first steps on what is presumably a long journey, is floodlighted by the hard white glare of a full moon. At one level, “Poem XXXVI” is a love poem. Within that genre, the moon is often used to suggest the tonic mystery of intimacy, the evocative closeness of powerful emotion, and the warm glow of romance. Here, however, the full moon creates distance not intimacy. The moon does not sustain mystery, but rather makes clarity unavoidable. The white light serves to heighten the narrator’s sense of foreboding by casting in harsh relief the long road that stretches ahead of him. Here the moon symbolizes the cool hard reality that the narrator so desperately (and understandably) wishes to minimize. I will soon return, he struggles to assure himself. The moonlight, however, exacerbates the narrator’s anxiety, worsens his sense of alienation. Given the klieg light overhead, there is no way to ignore the road ahead, no way to minimize the distance he must travel, the miles he must trudge, to borrow his verb, which he repeats. “White in the moon the long road lies” (Lines 1, 3, 15)—the line is repeated twice in the opening stanza and then again in the closing stanza, reminding the narrator of the chilling implications of his departure.
The Round World
The poem is in constant tension with itself between images that suggest stasis and reassuring stability and images that suggest the whirl of change and flux. The narrator wants the reassurance of stability despite the reality of his departure, with its clear indication of change. The round world, which the narrator uses in Stanza 3 to reassure himself that its spherical shape means that any path away from any place ultimately means that path will lead him back, suggests exactly that tension. The world around the narrator seems stable and reassuringly still (suggested by the hedges that line the road) and yet is constantly changing, constantly moving, constantly turning.
The round world tells the narrator even as he steps forward uncertainly into a future he cannot predict that inevitably, invariably, “the way will guide one back” (Line 12). The round world suggests to the narrator a perfect symbol of stasis and change, the very thing he needs to cling to as he leaves his love behind. He calls it the “circle homeward” (Line 13). All will be well, the round world tells him, things can change and still stay the same. The world he leaves will await his return. The logic, of course, is simplistic (after all, nothing in the natural world, not the moon, not the hedges, certainly not the world is static), and thus it is a measure of the depth of the anxiety the narrator feels.
The Long Road
The poem plays on the traditional symbolism of the open road ahead as a siren call to the willing for excitement, adventure, and a shattering of routine and expectations. It is the tonic pull of the open road that often signals the coming-of-age drama as the young and often naïve person discovers the joys and sorrows, the ironies and agonies of the real world. Rather than head to the open road with eagerness, the narrator sees the open road as a long and ceaseless challenge, a burden that must be taken up. There is no joy in the long road ahead, but there is anxiety, even fear. The road here does not harken to anything or to any place. Rather, the road simply and absolutely leads away, away from the familiar and from the consolation of love. The narrator never identifies where the long open road is leading him, never specifies the destination or the purpose. Thus, the road serves more as the antagonist in the poem. It is the narrator versus the road, the narrator summoning the fortitude and moral strength to accept the challenge of the road that seems endless, that seems unavoidable, that seems at every level to threaten.
