Point of View

“To an Athlete Dying Young” opens in a first-person plural perspective, which is most consistently maintained throughout the first two stanzas with the self-referential pronoun “we” in lines 2, 4 ,and 6. By implying multiple first-person speakers talking together, Housman emphasizes, early on, his poem's interest in the shared, subjective feelings of a community as they undergo the same tragic experience together. The first-person plural perspective, as a result, creates a sense of unified personal experience and mourning. This pluralized first-person is intermixed with a singular second-person perspective throughout the body of “To an Athlete Dying Young.” The second-person pronoun “you,” referring to the athlete who dies young, occurs most often throughout stanza one, where it often is paired in close proximity with “we,” and also in stanzas two and three. This pairing of “you” and “we” emphasizes the focus of Housman’s poem on the relationship between...