Poem Analysis; Because I Liked You Better by A. E. Housman

Poem Analysis; Because I liked you better by A. E. Housman

This poem was written by A. E. Housman in the nineteenth century, who was born in 1859 and died in 1936. This poem is divided into four stanzas which includes the meeting and the parting of two lovers. This poem was written in free verse with no particular rhyme schemes and has sixteen lines. The speaker of the poem would be the poet himself as suggested by the use of term ‘I’ in the poem. The tone of this poem is sad because this poem is about an unfulfilled love. The themes of this poem are rejection, sadness, longing and love.

The first line in the first stanza contains the perspective as first person with the speaker or the poet himself addressing a past lover. He used ‘liked’ rather than ‘loved’ in the line ‘because I liked you better’ to give an understatement signalling the emotional restrain of the rest of the poem. The speaker feels unable to express his emotions to their full extent, perhaps because he is afraid of rejection.

‘Than suits a man to say’ expresses the century or time they live in, which in the case of the poet, Victorian times, and their belief that men should be stoic and unemotional as feelings were seen as feminine and unmanly in their time.

‘It irked you’ is another understatement, meaning it annoyed the person the speaker liked. The object of the speaker’s affection was not happy about the speaker’s feelings. The speaker’s lover was ashamed of their romance and asked him to ‘throw the thought away’, an image showing the rejection of the speaker by his lover. The use of understatement here also belittles the affection felt by the speaker, as he is unimportant and unworthy to his lover.

‘The world’ mentioned in the second stanza, fifth line of the poem, could be metaphor for Victorian society, showing how inappropriate the speaker’s feeling for his lover was at that time. The metaphor could show that society is ‘between us’, as an obstacle keeping the lovers apart. The diction of ‘stiff and dry’ shows the awkward and cold parting