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