POETS Day! AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad

School has started abominably early. This is the first Friday of the new school year for one of my children and I’m disgusted by overreach. The other starts next week. A proper summer vacation starts on Memorial Day and ends on Labor Day. Anything else is a presumption on liberty. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Listen to Roger Waters, and if you don’t know what I mean by that, piss off early and stream Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Learn something worth learning. But first, a little verse.

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The very popularity of Housman’s poems poses something of a problem, an embarrassment, for literary critics, who are more comfortable explaining the glories of the obscure than extolling the virtues of the accessible.
– “The tragi-comedy of A. E. Housman” by Anthony Daniels, The New Criterion, March 2014

Alfred Edward Housman was a classics scholar, and a great one; “beyond serious dispute, among the greatest of all time,” according to Shakleton Bailey, apparently an impressive classics scholar himself, in the pages of a 1959 Listener magazine. He failed to get his degree at St. John’s College, Oxford. The hindsight view is that he focused too much on the lines of study that interested him to the detriment of the whole required to graduate. I’ve also read that he spent too much time with friends.

Regardless, his is a great academic redemption tale. A roommate named Moses Jackson, who figures prominently but I’ll get to that shortly, got Housman a job in the Patent Office, but his free time was spent in research. Over the course of ten years, he published impressively enough as a layman to be offered a position teaching Latin at University College, London, which he took. He’d later accept a position teaching the same at Cambridge. His was an exceptional career despite a wobbly start, though I’d like to believe that at least one Oxford classicist has cracked about their washouts shining light on the unwashed at the rival school.

Poetry was a sideline. Better put, writing poetry was a sideline. As a scholar he furthered understanding of Ovid, Juvenal, Propertius, and Lucan. He was known for ruthless precision. He sought to find or near the closest to the authors’ original works and scoured passed-down copies of their previous editors’ sins. That was the intent, and he wasn’t kind when discussing his predecessors’ or contemporaries’ errors. In the above quoted New Criterion article, Daniels reports five pages of pre-written insults were found in Housman’s papers. “Nature, not content with denying to Mr. . . . the faculty of thought, has endowed him with the faculty of writing,” and such, ready for deployment should he find a non-anachronism in somebody’s published opinion.

He didn’t take much interest in form in his own work, or if he did it was a matter settled at the start and not revisited. Mostly, he stuck to ballad variations, rhymed in couplets or abab, and didn’t flex any wordsmith muscles. Most of his rhymes are hard monosyllabic hits, easy pairing words like day for grey, bay, say, aye (which he used at least twice, upsetting my piratical pronounciation), etc. or dream with beam, stream, seem. All fine rhymes if used sparingly, but he didn’t show any ambition in that regard. It’s fair to call it cheap assembly no matter what your opinion of the result.

Poetry was a “secretion” according to Housman. It came out of him unbidden for the most part and he prized emotion over technique in his own work. What didn’t come immediately was labored. One of his four stanza works is said to have come to him in stages: two stanzas in a flash, another within the hour, and the final written over the course of several months. He’s considered a lightweight but his popularity forces critics to wrestle with him. If you’re all a fan of skunks at garden parties, Housman’s a joy.

A Shropshire Lad was self-published in 1896 to little success. Critics ignored or disparaged and sales were such that eventually Housman bought up whatever remained of the five hundred copies printed. In 1897 a friend published five hundred more. Then one thousand. Sales slowly grew and it became a regular in WWI packs, eventually one of the best-selling books of English poetry of the early twentieth century. Writes Daniels, “It is now difficult to believe that, so long as there is anyone to read poetry in English, they will ever go out of print.”

Housman wasn’t from Shropshire. “I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time,” he wrote. A Shropshire Lad, with its melancholy, loneliness, murder, suicide, lost love, and despair of passing time he claimed was never meant to be autobiographical. A discarded title he considered was The Poems of Terence Hearsay, as the poems are meant to be a collection of stories or moments from a cast of characters recounted to our listener Terence. But there is clearly some of his experience in it.

Nick Laird writes in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems that,

“Jackson died in 1923, and critical studies of Housman suggest that his two bursts of poetic activity were both occasioned by the loss of Jackson – the first (A Shropshire Lad) when Jackson left for India, and the second (Last Poems) when he learned of Jackson’s illness. His own wry description of how he wrote doesn’t quite overturn that notion, and indeed the tone seems to mock and disguise, consciously or not, the heart of the impulse, that ‘sudden and unaccountable emotion.’”

That would be Moses Jackson, the roommate mentioned earlier. Housman fell in love with the man and never fell out. When he expressed himself, Jackson affirmed his heterosexuality. They apparently remained friends, but at a distance. Jackson moved to India, coming back to marry at a ceremony Housman was neither invited to nor told about until after.

XXI
Bredon Hill

In summertime on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.

Here of a Sunday morning
My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky.

The bells would ring to call her
In valleys miles away:
‘Come all to church, good people;
Good people, come and pray.
But here my love would stay.

And I would turn and answer
Among the springing thyme,
‘Oh, peal upon our wedding,
And we will hear the chime,
And come to church in time.

But when the snows at Christmas
On Bredon top were strewn,
My love rose up so early
And stole out unbeknown
And went to church alone.

They tolled the one bell only,
Groom there was none to see,
The mourners followed after,
And so to church went she,
And would not wait for me.

The bells they sound on Bredon,
And still the steeples hum.
‘Come all to church, good people,’ –
Oh, noisy bells, be dumb;
I hear you, I will come.

Nothing of this was revealed to the public until after Housman’s death when his brother Laurence published poems and other writings from A.E.’s notebooks, though there were hints.

XXX

Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, ’tis nothing new.

More than I, if truth were told,
Have stood and sweated hot and cold,
And through their reins in ice and fire
Fear contended with desire.

Agued once like me were they,
But I like them shall win my way
Lastly to the bed of mould
Where there’s neither heat nor cold.

But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.

Shropshire was so popular that the work has defined the man. It’s all but forgotten that he wrote light and funny verses in addition. It’s tempting to read some of the supposedly sorrowful poems ironically. Some demand you do so as does “VIII.” A murderer confesses to Terence that he’s killed his brother and must run away.

from VIII

‘My mother thinks us long away;
’Tis time the field were mown.
She had two sons at rising day,
To-night she’ll be alone.

And a couple of stanzas later,

‘Long for me the rick will wait,
And long will wait the fold,
And long will stand the empty plate,
And dinner will be cold.’

Framing murder as a disruption in domestic affairs is a nice touch. Things like that always remind me of Edward Gorey.

The most famous lines from the cycle come in the second stanza of the very long (for Housman) “LXII,” as an unknown teases Terence for finding solace in poetry when there, he believes, are better ways to do so. You’ll recognize them seven lines down.

from LXII

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

The serious poems are more numerous, and they don’t require pointing out. Housman was an atheist who saw death as a finality. He references resting under earth or under mould several times and several I’ve come across point out that he was unhappy. John Berryman wrote in Paris Review,

“Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvelous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.”

Nick Laird points out that Berryman never met Housman. Daniels offers “Housman was not a happy man; but unhappiness is not the same as misery, or the quality of being miserable (which is different yet again).” Others agree that Housman was burdened by unrequited love but resigned to and accepting of that as his lot. It’s a leap from disappointment to malevolence, pre-written insults aside. Death was the end of unhappiness. Grant the occasional lapses.

XLV

If it chance your eye offend you,
Pluck it out, lad, and be sound:
‘Twill hurt, but here are salves to friend you,
And many a balsam grows on ground.

And if your hand or foot offend you,
Cut it off, lad, and be whole;
But play the man, stand up and end you,
When your sickness is your soul.

This was published well before World War I; Ferdinand was still hunting elephants and seeing the world from his Pullman car. It was between Boer Wars. Those are the big two, the Boers, from my understanding of British history, that would have roused interest. I’m assuming that Housman’s refences to soldiers in or heading off to battle were of the first or possibly of a build up to the second. Elvis Costello wrote a very convincing song called “Oliver’s Army” about the never restful life of a British soldier in times of both war and supposed peace, so who knows what adventures he saw those fellows get up to.

What elevated Housman in the face of confounded critics was that he connected with a moment. Polished orators know the power of adopting an “Aw shucks” relatability. We’ll praise a politician’s ability to connect with people through mannerism. Real “Aw shucks” speakers usually get dismissed as rubes. Housman says what he means and feels in a simple way. His ennui appealed to a generation fighting for a world as they grew disillusioned with it. So much un-preservable worth preserving.

LVI
The Day of Battle

“Far I hear the bugle blow
To call me where I would not go,
And the guns begin the song,
‘Soldier, fly or stay for long.'”

“Comrade, if to turn and fly
Made a soldier never die,
Fly I would, for who would not?
‘Tis sure no pleasure to be shot.”

“But since the man that runs away
Lives to die another day,
And cowards’ funerals, when they come
Are not wept so well at home.”

“Therefore, though the best is bad,
Stand and do the best my lad;
Stand and fight and see your slain,
And take the bullet in your brain.”