A Shropshire Lad by Alfred Edward Housman

A Shropshire Lad (1896) is a cycle of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman. 

 

Themes and style:
The main theme of A Shropshire Lad is mortality, and so living life to its fullest, since death can strike at any time. For example, number IV, titled "Reveille", urges an unnamed "lad" to stop sleeping in the daylight, for "When the journey's over/There'll be time enough to sleep."
One of Housman's most familiar poems is number XIII from A Shropshire Lad, untitled but often anthologised under a title taken from its first line. The Oxf Dictionary of Quotations includes no fewer than fourteen of its sixteen lines