The poem featured at the end of the 1971 film Walkabout is an excerpt from "A Shropshire Lad" by A.E. Housman, specifically Poem XL. This poignant verse beautifully encapsulates themes of lost innocence and an unreachable past, echoing the film's narrative.
The Poignant Verse Concluding Walkabout
As the credits roll in Nicolas Roeg's atmospheric survival drama, the haunting words of A.E. Housman's poetry appear, leaving a lasting impression on the viewer. The poem reflects the film's central themes of the irreversible impact of experience and the longing for a simpler, lost time.
The full lines of the poem displayed are:
Into my heart an air that kills,
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went,
And cannot come again.
This particular excerpt is from Poem XL of A.E. Housman's acclaimed collection, A Shropshire Lad, first published in 1896. The collection often explores themes of mortality, love, youth, and the English countryside, imbued with a sense of melancholic nostalgia.
A.E. Housman and A Shropshire Lad
| Author | Collection | Specific Poem Number | Themes |
|---|---|---|---|
| A.E. Housman | A Shropshire Lad | Poem XL | Lost innocence, nostalgia, the passage of time |
The selection of this poem for the film's conclusion perfectly resonates with the journey of the two British children who find themselves stranded in the Australian outback. Their encounter with an Aboriginal boy and their subsequent return to civilization marks an irreversible transition from innocence to experience, mirroring the "land of lost content" that can "cannot come again." The poem serves as a powerful elegy for what has been lost and the enduring memory of a past that is forever out of reach.
For more information about the film Walkabout, you can visit its IMDb page.
