This means that in reading it, the reader is slowed down, the thoughts appearing to have greater weight. There is some alliteration and also some flipped syntax, such as His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves, and The thoughts that hurt him, they were there. What give this poem its attractiveness is the strength of the lines by which I mean that they are reasonably dense.
But such troubles soon pass: today, the speaker reflects, the Roman and his worries are ashes under the ground. The same thoughts which worry and plague Housman’s Victorian speaker were, essentially, also present in the mind and heart of the Roman. In those days, some hapless Roman, much like his latter-day counterpart the poem’s speaker, would stand and watch the wind threshing the forest. Housman’s speaker, the fictional Shropshire lad of the volume, sees the wind blowing violently through the nearby woods near the hill known as the Wrekin, shaking the leaves from the trees, and reflects that the wind used to blow like this through the wooded hill (‘holt’) and the wood by that hillside (‘hanger’) in the days when Uriconium stood on the same site. This was not some remote outpost of Roman Britain: it had a substantial population, and is thought to have been perhaps the fourth-largest Roman settlement in Britain. Uriconium was the name of the ancient Roman settlement which stood on the site of modern-day Wroxeter in Shropshire, and it is this ancient and long-vanished world, some two thousand years earlier during the Roman occupation of Britain, that ‘On Wenlock Edge’ calls up. Like many poems in A Shropshire Lad, ‘On Wenlock Edge’ is about the brevity of life – but, as elsewhere in Housman, this is seen as having its positive aspects as well as its obvious downside. The poet and critic William Empson once suggested for his epitaph: ‘No more bother.’ In a way, Housman’s ‘On Wenlock Edge’ offers a similar sentiment: life may be nasty and brutish, but it is also short, and no matter how great our troubles may seem to us now, they will soon be no more, because we will be no more.
Although Housman barely knew Shropshire – he was born in neighbouring Worcestershire, and the closest he appears to have got to the county before he wrote A Shropshire Lad is peering at the steeples of Shropshire churches across the county boundary – his 1896 volume is the book that gave Shropshire its lasting literary reputation, and many of the poems in A Shropshire Lad mythologise and romanticise the county as a microcosm of provincial England. Housman’s collection of 63 poems, A Shropshire Lad (1896).
‘On Wenlock Edge’ is one of the most famous poems from A.
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