To an Athlete Dying Young
I remember that day so vividly, it’s hard to believe it was over 60 years ago.
In the fall of 1963 I was in my senior year at NYU Heights. (See Ghostwriting in the Family, The Fortune Cookie Candidate and Theatre Dreams)
I was a member of the college theatre group, and half-past noon on Friday, November 22 we were in the midst of rehearsing a play when someone came running towards the stage crying out that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. We stopped the rehearsal of course, and amidst our shock, rage, and tears, we disbursed. Some students rushed to their dorms to call family, some sought friends or sweethearts on campus, and commuter students like me headed home. Whatever classes any of us had later that day were either cancelled or we cut.
I regularly commuted by bus between the Heights’ west Bronx campus and my parents’ house in the east Bronx, and I clearly remember my bus trip home that day. Rather than full of the usual passenger chatter, the bus was eerily silent, as were the city streets we drove through – the same unsettling feeling that pervaded New York decades later on September 11.
There were no cell phones then of course and no one on the bus had a transistor radio that day – and we were all desperate to know what was happening in Dallas. Then, as another bus approached from the opposite direction, our driver slowed down and opened his window. The other driver did the same and leaned over to share the awful news that the bullet had been fatal.
When I got home my parents had the television on and, like the rest of the nation, we watched TV coverage of the assassination over that weekend and for many days to come.
On Monday I went back to campus. Only three days had passed, but walking across the college green to the auditorium where the dean was to speak, I felt I had aged.
After the dean addressed us, the professor who taught my Chaucer course took the podium. That semester in class we’d been reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, but on that somber day our professor read the famous elegy by the 19th century poet A E Houseman, To an Athlete Dying Young.
The time you won your town the race / We chaired you through the market -place;
Man and boy stood cheering by / And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come, / Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you on your threshold down, / Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away, / From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows / It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes that shady night has shut / Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers / After earth has stopped the ears.
Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran / And the name died before the man.
So before the echoes fade, / The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up / The still defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head / Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls / The garland briefer than a girl’s.
– Dana Susan Lehrman
Dana Susan LehrmanThis retired librarian loves big city bustle and cozy country weekends, friends and family, good books and theatre, movies and jazz, travel, tennis, Yankee baseball, and writing about life as she sees it on her blog World Thru Brown Eyes!
www.WorldThruBrownEyes.com
We all remember exactly where we were when we heard the news, Dana. For my JFK assassination story, see https://www.myretrospect.com/stories/the-end-of-the-innocence/. At first I wondered why you published your story on the Poetry prompt, but then I came to the wonderful poem that you ended with.
Yes Suzy we all do remember where we were that awful day, and just read your Home Ec story.
And I remember my folks telling me where they were when they learned of the death of FDR.
The poem is quite moving, Dana. Thanks for sharing it again. It was an awful day that everyone who was alive will always remember.
Thanx Betsy!
Nice poetry selection. Housman is one of my favorites. I do wonder what the hell happened to him in early life; nearly all of his output is sad. My guess is he had his heart broken and never fully came back from it.
You’re right Dave, much of Housman’s poetry is dark. Don’t know much about his early life but he was a gay man in an era when that was not universally accepted.
On that somber day in 1963 I believe my professor read the perfect poem for that sad occasion.
Horrible day — and, yes, we all remember exactly where we were. But what a breautiful (and unexpected) poem to memorialize it. What an amazing professor. And thank you, Dana, for sharing it with us.
Thanx John.
Thank you, Dana, for this heartfelt memory of a day impossible to forget. Houseman’s poetry is a fitting tribute to Kennedy and what he meant to so many of us.
Thanx Jim, yes I think my professor read the perfect poem for that tragic time.
I’m in tears, Dana. That is one of my favorite poems and so perfectly captures how we felt. On a lighter note, I also read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Don’t think I could do that now.
Thanx Laurie, sadly it was a perfect poem for the day.
And surely I couldn’t read the Middle English now either!
Thanks to you and to A.E. Houseman. We don’t have enough of him in our culture.
Thanx Dale, indeed.
Thanks for reposting this Dana, and for the poem, which I savored. I knew of it but didn’t remember it–certainly appropriate for the topic. One can only hope that some misguided memory of adulation for JFK doesn’t sway people to vote for his addled relative now running for office.
Thanx Khati.
I’m sure JFK is turning over in his grave over the whole political scene going on down here. And the anti-vax nephew is part of the mess!