Question

What is the literal meaning of this poem? Into my heart an air that kills

Answer 1

The poem may be summarised in a couple of brief sentences. The speaker views a distant land and recalls, with a certain melancholy nostalgia, the hills and spires of his homeland. He recognises that, whilst he was happy when he lived there, he cannot return there now he is older and has left that land behind.

The traditional quatrain form of the poem, with the abab rhyme scheme, is used in many of Housman’s poems, and here the form serves him well, allowing him to reflect on the passing of time (and the futility of longing for a land and age that is dead and gone) in taut, regularly rhythmic stanzas. Yet there is some subtlety to the word choices: note A E Housman Shropshire Lad hillsthat ‘blue remembered hills’ is not hyphenated, so does Housman mean that the hills are literally blue (unusual, but perhaps not impossible) or should we analyse ‘blue’ as denoting melancholy nostalgia? The lack of a hyphen introduces some doubt: ‘blue-remembered hills’ would suggest that the speakerer, it is worth examining how Housman creates the emotional punch that his poem carries. The fortieth poem from A Shropshire Lad, which begins ‘Into my heart an air that kills’, is one of his most famous poems, a short lyric about nostalgia and growing old.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.