A Shropshire Lad

First issued in 1896, this sequence of sixty-three lyric poems is spoken largely by or about young men of an imagined English countryside named as Shropshire. The poems treat enlistment and death in foreign wars, the brevity of youth, doomed love, hangings, and the consolation of landscape and beer. Recurring figures include soldiers, lovers, and the dead who speak from the grave. The diction is ballad-plain; the mood is elegiac rather than narrative. There is no continuous plot: the book is a cycle of short lyrics that return to the same county, the same early deaths, and the same sense that time and the army take the lads away.

Bound in pale grey canvas with an illustration, spine decorated in dark brown and gold or black alone. Palle brown endleaves printed in brown. Brown slipcase printed in dark brown.