Here dead we lie

Here dead we lie, by Alfred Edward Housman

Here dead we lie

Because we did not choose

To live and shame the land

From which we sprung.

Life, to be sure,

Is nothing much to lose,

But young men think it is,

And we were young.

A.E Houseman was a poet and an English classic scholar. He was most commonly known for his collection of poems, A Shropshire Land. He attended St. John’s College in Oxford in 1877. He was born on March 26, 1859, Bromsgrove, England, and died on April 30, 1936, Cambridge, England. He was 77 when he died.

Moses Jackson, Houseman’s roommate in Oxford was one of his inspirations for poetry because he had fallen in love with him. Houseman had never married because he was gay.   His last few years of life were spent in a nursing home, where he passed away in his sleep.

            This poem has different themes and tones, the main theme is how nationalistic the soldiers were, and there is a sarcastic tone to the poem. It gives off a feel that the older soldiers did not care for life and it was unimportant, though the younger soldiers felt offended that the older would not care for their lives.

I think that he wrote this poem to symbolize how he thought that many of the young soldiers felt during the war. They felt like they had to earn something by being in the war, they wanted to receive honour rather than their own safety. Life was not worth living if they could not protect it. This must reflect how he felt on the war too.