A Shropshire Lad, Poem XXXVI

The brief lyric is at once inviting and terrifying. The narrator confesses anxiety over his leaving a place and presumably a person at once familiar and comforting. That confession is made specific, the poem never shares the particulars of the narrator’s basic situation. The reader never learns from where the narrator is departing, why he is leaving, or even where he is going. That lack of specificity creates in the reader the same sense of foreboding and anxiety that troubles the narrator himself. If, for instance, the poem had specified that the narrator was heading off to find his employment prospects in the city or perhaps leaving to join the army and serve overseas or departing to attend college or even leaving to satisfy some romantic youthful wanderlust, anything would specify the conditions of the departure and thus in a way ease the anxiety. All the reader is given is a long and winding road away. There is, after all, thematically a significant emotional difference between a narrator leaving home to make his fortune in the city and a narrator simply leaving home, refusing to look back, uneasy over looking too far ahead. The disturbing condition of that open ended-ness, existential in its implications, underscored by the departure at night under a full moon that only illuminates and makes that much more vivid the long empty road ahead, creates in the reader the same sense of unease that troubles the narrator. The road leads away, certainly, but not toward, the “long road” (Line 3) ahead opens up with a kind of problematic sense of unnerving foreboding. Every step the narrator takes, his feet moving steadily in the “moonlit dust” (Line 7), marks a movement away from the secure, the familiar, the reassuring.

The second stanza uses the adverb “still” (Lines 5, 6) in two ways. The narrator marks the bushes and hedges that grow along the dirt road. They are still, washed by the hard glare of the white moonlight. They are motionless, a suggestion of the indifference of the rural home the narrator leaves to the conditions of his emotional departure. They stand guard along the country road; the narrator refuses to endow them with generous personification that might suggest how the rural countryside shares in the agony and the emotional distress of the narrator who is leaving. They stand, still, unimpressed by the emotional turmoil of the narrator. In a different sense of the word, however, the night is quiet, no gusts of wind disturb the bushes and hedges. They are still despite the narrator, whose life is upended and in evident change. That they are “still” (Lines 5, 6) suggests the narrator, himself struggling to handle change, is reaching for the reassurance that the world he is leaving will remain intact until his return, that even if he changes, that world will stay the same and at some point will welcome him back. He is desperate to find something that will remain, will defy his own inner sense of a world changing. That stillness measures the anxiety of his departure, his deep-seated hope that something, anything, will survive his journey.

The narrator then splits into his heart, troubled and anxious, and his head, reasonable and logical and determined to provide some reassurance to the disquieted heart. In Stanza 3, the narrator tells his heart to relax. After all the earth is itself a ball; that is, it is round. No path that leads away does not also inevitably, really mathematically, lead back to where it begins. Travel away is as well travel toward. All will be well, the brain assures the heart, no matter how far the travels, all roads must logically return to the point of departure. The logic of it is at once wonderfully airtight and absolutely unconvincing. The ineffectiveness of the reassurance by the use in Line 12 of the impersonal imperial pronoun “one.” The road will guide one back, rather than the reassuringly intimate personal pronoun “me.” The line, indeed the poem itself, would read entirely differently had the narrator used the comforting pronoun “me.” Without that pronoun, however, the narrator, and the reader by extension, is left within the logic of a reassurance that offers no reassurance at all.

The pronoun exposes the emptiness of the narrator’s rhetoric of comfort.

In the closing stanza, the narrator comes to grips with the sobering implications of his departure. The world he knows, the still green rural world, and the love for which, just beginning his journey, he already yearns, he begins to see are lost to him. The folly of his logical assumption that the path away is in fact the path back is exposed in the stark closing two lines, the return of the narrative focus on the blank, unblinking white klieg light of the moon and the sheer reach of the road itself. Like a refrain in a song, the poem closes repeating the line about how the road leads from his love. That refrain, however, carries much more emotional weight than before. The line now rings heavier, more sobering because the best reassurance he can muster has proven to be little consolation. In the end, the heart understands what the mind can so glibly dismiss. The stubborn and thorny reality he resists—that with every step he takes along the dirt road the love he knows cools more and more into a comfortless memory impossible to forget and impossible to reclaim—closes the poem in a melancholic quietus.