To An Athlete Dying Old?
Dying Gaul
“To An Athlete Dying Young” popped into my head last week. I remembered it from high school—not the poem but the title: “dying” and “young” together in the same thought put a brief shiver in our teenage immortality illusion. Who was this dead guy and what did him in: heat stroke? EPO? coronary?, a sidewalk punk shot him for his bling? The poem itself, which I just googled, doesn’t offer much in the way of hard news. Literary gossips pursued the tabloid angle: the unnamed “athlete” was the love object of the poet, A.E. Housman, who hid in the closet and never came out.
As far as I can tell, Housman was in no shape to remotely relate to sports: small and frail, the product of a coddling mother and a Stalinesque father, the sum of these parts a wimp with a facial tic who hung out in reading rooms, studied Latin in the British Museum library and wrote wistful, agonized verse the critics dubbed “romantic pessimism”.
The primary source of the romance and the pessimism was Moses Jackson, the bisexual beefcake who became the poet’s fatal attraction.
Fig-leafers of the time called it a “deep, youthful friendship”–whom were they kidding? We’re talking Nineties here—not the 1990s, when gay was mainstream OK—the 1890s, where even in trendy Europe, an admitted poet and suspected poufta kept a low profile. Soon enough, the divine Jackson dumped Housman for a woman, which may explain why the poet turns him into a dead athlete and buries him in the first stanza.
What’s the point of all this in a master’s athlete blog? The Housman poem is evidence of the traditional mindset about fun and games, where men were manly (no place for girleymen or women) but only for a short prime time, after which they wasted away and lived off their moldy laurels, when they’d be better off as funeral fodder.
As I swallow my daily prostate and cholesterol pills, I’m wondering, why hasn’t anybody written “To an Athlete Dying Old?” Housman couldn’t have, because in his era, “athlete” and “old” didn’t belong in the same thought and more than he and Jackson belonged in the same cot in the Cotswolds. Now we know better, and a contemporary Moses Jackson (if he really was an athlete and not just a hunk) could be out there competing in the Huntsman Games or the Masters or the Senior Olympics and presumably, happy to be alive and sweating.
