1. Refers to Housman’s love for Moses Jackson.

2. Housman was a self-confessed gastronome.

1. The gardens at Perry Hall, Housman’s home till the age of about fourteen, contained a cherry tree that was celebrated for miles around; and the avenue of cherry trees at Trinity College, Cambridge, was planted at Housman’s instigation, while he was a Fellow at the College.

1. In a letter dated 30 September 1930 (Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania), Housman states that this was the only poem in ASL that was not written at Byron Cottage, Highgate.

2. ‘a piece of lead or other metal attached to a line, and used for sounding or measuring the depth of water’ (OED). Cf. The Tempest, III. iii. 101: ‘I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded’.

3. heal.

1. ‘There is no Bredon Hill in Shropshire, only Breidden Hills’ (Housman to an unnamed correspondent in a letter dated 14 July 1927). ‘Bredon is the Worcestershire hill […]. The poem is one of the earliest, written before I knew the book would be Shropshire’ (Housman to H. E. Butler, 3 January 1930).

2. Worcestershire and Gloucestershire.

3. The adjective was arrived at with some difficulty, as Laurence Housman describes in My Brother, A. E. Housman: ‘I asked him once whether, as a rule, his so happily-chosen adjectives had come to him spontaneously or after labour and with difficulty; and I gave as an instance “coloured counties”, a phrase which has become famous. “Now, that you should have picked that out”, he said, “is interesting. When I wrote the poem I put down, just to fill up for the time, a quite ordinary adjective, which didn’t satisfy me; others followed. Then with my poem in my head, I went to bed and dreamed, and in my dream I hit on the word ‘painted’; when I woke up I saw that ‘painted’ wouldn’t do, but it gave me ‘coloured’ as the right word.” This is confirmed in the first draft of the poem which I found in one of his note-books, where the alternatives run: sunny, pleasant, checkered, patterned; “painted” is left out, it was not necessary for that to be written down – it had suggested the right word.’

1. The poem was printed, with Housman’s permission, on one of The Times Broadsheets for the trenches. Housman’s attitude to soldiers and war is complex. He admired their courage and self-sacrifice, and envied perhaps those who died young and with honour.

2. a soldier in the British Army.

1. The poem was printed, with Housman’s permission, on one of The Times Broadsheets for the trenches.

2. In 1 Henry IV, Act IV, sc. ii, 64–7, Falstaff refers to the ‘pitiful rascals’ about to fight at the Battle of Shrewsbury as ‘food for powder’.

3. The inference is that man’s life is of short duration. Cf. Job xiv, 1: ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.’

1. pale.

1. One of the most poignant expressions in A Shropshire Lad of Housman’s longing for the innocent land of childhood and the countryside west of Bromsgrove where he would roam as a young boy. Cf. ‘Far in a western brookland’ (p. 670).

1. a hill town at the confluence of the Rivers Corve and Teme, some twenty-five miles south of Shrewsbury. The annual fair was held on 1 May.

2. tillage, ploughing.

1. The poem was printed, with Housman’s permission, on one of The Times Broadsheets for the trenches.

2. Wenlock Edge is a fifteen-mile-long and 1,000-feet-high limestone escarpment near Much Wenlock in Shropshire.

3. The Wrekin (from the Roman Vr-ikon – ‘City of Iconium’) is an extinct volcano near Shrewsbury, some 1,335 feet high.

4. wood and hillside thicket.

5. Viriconium was an ancient Roman city near Wroxeter, south-east of Shrewsbury.

1. A reference to the ‘twelve quarters’ from which the wind can blow.

2. ‘to form out of parts compacted’ (OED).

3. A play on words: ‘quickly’ and ‘quick, alive’.

1. ‘I could not say that I have a favourite among my poems. Thomas Hardy’s was no. XXVII in A Shropshire Lad, and I think it may be the best, though it is not the most perfect’ (Housman to Houston Martin, 28 March 1933 and 27 September 1935).

1. The prefatory quatrain is traditional, and the proper names are all small Shropshire villages.

2. a corruption of ‘Onny’. The East Onny and West Onny rivers join at Eaton, flow south-east as the River Onny to join the River Teme at Bromfield. The River Clun rises below the Black Mountain and flows past the four villages mentioned in the quatrain with which the poem opens.

3. a town on the Teme, now in Powys.

4. ‘To handsel’ = ‘to be the first to test, try, prove’ (OED).

1. The opening two lines are a direct translation of the traditional French song ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois’, set to music by J.-B. Weckerlin.

1. detect, discover, decipher.

1. ‘ “Fancy’s Knell” was chosen with intent, as my Shropshire, like the Cambridge of Lycidas, is not exactly a real place, and the topography and customs of Abdon do not correspond to fact’ (letter to Gerald Bullett, 20 April 1933).

2. village to the west of Brown Clee Hill some eight miles north-east of Ludlow.

3. darkened.

4. one of three Iron Age hill forts on Brown Clee near Abdon in Shropshire.

1. Housman uses the Ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, the ‘Grecian lad’ punished for rejecting lovers (including the nymph Echo) by being made to fall in love with his own image. Narcissus saw his image reflected in a pool, fell in love with it, tried in vain to approach it, grew desperate and finally killed himself. His blood was changed into a flower which now bears his name.

2. a species of narcissus, with long leaves and spikes of fragrant white and yellow flowers.

1. on the point of stripping.

1. the wild daffodil that blooms in Lent.

2. the wood anemone (Anemone nemorosa) or any plant of the genus Anemone.

3. gathering flowers in May.

1. ‘sincere, single-minded’ (OED).

1. The River Teme flows through Ludlow.

1. Refers almost certainly to Fockbury, where Housman was born.

1. Much Wenlock.

2. blossoms of the hawthorn.

1. is strewn upon.

2. promontories shine like a beacon.

1. Pisces.

2. mistle-thrush.

1. The Poems of Terence Hearsay had been Housman’s original title, which he changed on the advice of A. W. Pollard to A Shropshire Lad.

2. the harvest festival celebrated on 1 August.

1. A clear reference to Housman’s break with Moses Jackson.

1. The poem, written a year after the event, describes Housman’s parting from Moses Jackson, his close university friend, who in 1887 had fallen in love with a young widow, Mrs Rosa Chambers. Jackson resigned from the Patent Office where he was working and took up the headmastership of a prestigious school in Karachi. When Jackson married Rosa, Housman was kept in the dark and not invited to the church service in Paddington.

2. shoots up.