The New York Sun has run “When I Was One-and-Twenty,” “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,” and “The Oracles” by A.E. Housman (1859–1936). And along the way, we’ve called him the gold standard of modern verse for poets with a formalist bent, mentioning how easy he makes it all seem. 

Today’s Poem of the Day, “To an Athlete Dying Young,” is no exception. Perhaps Housman’s most-anthologized work, the poem is a masterclass in how to rhyme effortlessly and convey a thought with exceptional neatness. The thought itself is typical of Housman’s grim sense of life and death and his cynicism about the tributes of the world.

In seven quatrains formed from tetrameter couplets, “To an Athlete Dying Young” reads easy and goes down smooth. But its argument is that, for those who have achieved an early fame, it may be wise to die young: “Eyes the shady night has shut / Cannot see the record cut,” Housman says of his young athlete. “Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads that wore their honours out, / Runners whom renown outran / And the name died before the man.”

The thought is not a particularly deep one, and it probably isn’t true. But it captures a mood — an errant notion that one would have to be less than fully human not to have had — about decline from the high points of life. It’s the theme of pop songs and movies about the lives of, say, high-school football stars after high school. Housman just does it better and more neatly.