A. E. Housman’s “Is my team ploughing,” which appears in the poet’s famous collection titled A Shropshire Lad, consists of eight stanzas, each of which has the same ABCB rime scheme. The poem is structured like an interview: the first stanza asks a question and the second stanza provides an answer, and it continues with that structure throughout the poem.
First and Second Stanzas: Farming
In the first stanza, a dead man asks a question of a living man. The dead man wants to know if the team of horses he used to plough his farmland is still working; thus, he asks, “Is my team ploughing?” He adds redundantly “That I used to drive,” but then charmingly, “And hear the harness jingle.”
Because the speaker is dead and no longer has the ability or need to farm, nor to hear the jingling of the horses’ harness, he asks his friend if these things are going on as they did when the questioner was “man alive.”
The answer is promptly given that yes indeed, the horses are ploughing and the harness is jingling; in fact, nothing has changed since the questioner died, that is, even though the dead former farmer now lies “under / The land [he] used to plough.”
Third and Fourth Stanzas: Football
Then the dead speaker asks if the boys are still playing football: “Is football playing / Along the river shore, / With lads to chase the leather.” The dead speaker makes it clear that he knows where they used to play and adds the detail of the boys chasing the ball as they played. He reminds the living friend that he is dead and cannot play any longer: “Now I stand up no more.”
The friend then answers that indeed the boys are still enjoying their hearty game, emphasizing his affirmative answer by adding, “The goal stands up, the keeper / Stands up to keep the goal.” The repetition of the word “stands” furthers the contrast between the live players and the dead questioner who “stand[s] up no more.”
Fifth and Sixth Stanzas: Sweetheart
In the fifth stanza, the dead man asks about his sweetheart, whom he “thought hard to leave.” He wants to know if she has stopped pining and crying for him. The dead man assumes that his girl would have mourned his passing and still might be in mourning.
But the friend replies that the sweetheart is contented, and when she goes to bed at night, she is not weeping. At this point, the reader becomes suspicious: how does this friend know that the dead man’s sweetheart is no longer mourning and that when she goes to bed she is not weeping?
Seventh and Eighth Stanzas: Friend
The final question that the dead man poses is about his friend, the person he has been addressing all along. The dead questioner asks if his friend is well, while once again emphasizing his own death: the dead man cannot be “hearty” but instead is “thin and pine.” And he wants to know if the still living friend has “found to sleep in / A better bed than mine?”
The friend then assures the dead man that he is fine, and he sleeps as well as anyone would want to. But he adds a bit of information that surely he would not want the dead questioner to know, “I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart.” And he adds, “Never ask me whose,” which does, in fact, end the questioning.
Commentary
The poem is a dramatization of the guilty conscience experienced by the living man, who can still enjoy all the things that his dead friend has had to give up.
The living friend feels especially guilty about taking his place with the dead questioner’s sweetheart. That is why he tells the dead questioner, “Never ask me whose.”
Other Housman articles:
- Housman’s 'Loveliest of trees': More than Carpe Diem
- Reconciling Death: Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” and Yogananda’s “The Dying Youth’s Divine Reply”
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