Is My Team Ploughing

"Is My Team Ploughing" is a poem by A. E. Housman, published as number XXVII in his 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad. It is a conversation between a dead man and his still living friend. Toward the end of the poem it is implied that the friend is now with the girl left behind when the narrator died. In writing the poem, Housman borrows from the simple style of traditional folk ballads, featuring a question-and-answer format in a conversation.

IS MY TEAM PLOUGHING

"Is my team ploughing,
  That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
  When I was man alive?"

Ay, the horses trample,
  The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
  The land you used to plough.
...
"Is my girl happy,
  That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
  As she lies down at eve?"

Ay, she lies down lightly,
  She lies not down to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
  Be still, my lad, and sleep.

"Is my friend hearty,
  Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
  A better bed than mine?"

Yes, lad, I lie easy,
  I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
  Never ask me whose.
  —Stanzas 1-2, 5-8[1]

The text, along with other poems from A Shropshire Lad, has been famously set to music by several English composers, including George Butterworth (Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad), Ralph Vaughan Williams (On Wenlock Edge) and Ivor Gurney.[2]:640 Vaughan Williams omitted the third and fourth verses, to Housman's annoyance, writing years later that he felt “a composer has a perfect right artistically to set any portion of a poem he chooses provided he does not actually alter the sense” of it. “I also feel,” he added, “that a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as: “‘The goal stands up, the Keeper / Stands up to keep the Goal.’”[3][2]:235–236

References
  1. Housman, A. E. (1906). A Shropshire Lad. New York: John Lane Company. pp. 38-40.
  2. Banfield, Stephen (1989). Sensibility and English Song; Critical Studies of the Early Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521379441.
  3. Stuart Wright, Sewanee Review, 118, No.1. Winter 2010
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