Who is the athlete in the poem, To an Athlete Dying Young?

Housman’s athlete both falls in the line with the heroic tropes that Housman was familiar with through his scholastic study of the classics and simultaneously deviates from those tropes. Notably, the athlete is valorized by his community for his physical prowess from the first lines of “To an Athlete Dying young” through how “you won your town the race” (1). In addition, as in the classics, the athlete’s body in death becomes a site of contending with the short-lived nature of glory, which his community in Shropshire insists has been successfully manifested with his early death at the height of his heroism: “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” (17-20).

While the titular athlete, as a character, certainly pays homage to heroic tropes from Housman’s classical past, he is also used by Housman to explore a new model of heroism. Housman’s speakers imply that because he has died young and at home in Shropshire, he will be immortalized forever in the communal memory – “Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay” (9-10). His early deprivation of heroic agency is what, ironically, immortalizes his heroism. In this way, too, the athlete is an alternative to the classical hero’s journey, in which the hero ventures away into the unknown and triumphantly undergoes homecoming. Rather, Housman’s athlete suggests that an already-fleeting glory is perhaps even more easily grasped within the provincial confines of one’s locale – the Shropshire speakers insist that they will forever remember the athlete as a local hero.