by A E Housman
VI.
VI.
VI.
VI. LANCER
VII.
VII.
VII.
VII.
VIII.
VIII.
VIII.
VIII.A
VIII.B
VIII.C
Wake: the silver dusk returning
Westward on the high-hilled plains
What, little Arthur, do you know
When Adam day by day
When I came last to Ludlow
When I meet the morning beam
When I was one-and-twenty
When I watch the living meet
When smoke stood up from Ludlow
When the lad for longing sighs
Whit Monday, 1903
White in the moon the long road lies
White is the wold, and ghostly
With rue my heart is laden
X.
X.
X.
X.
XI.
XI.
XI.
XI.
XI.A
XII.
XII.
XII.
XII.
XIII.
XIII.
XIII.
XIII. THE DESERTER
XIV.
XIV.
XIV.
XIV. THE CULPRIT
XIX.
XIX.
XIX.
XIX. The Defeated
XL.
XL.
XL.
XLI.
XLI.
XLI. FANCY’S KNELL
XLII.
XLII. A. J. J.
XLIII.
XLIII.
XLIV
XLIV.
XLV.
XLV. Christmas Carol
XLVI.
XLVI. The Land of Biscay
XLVII.
XLVIII. Parta Quies
XV.
XV.
XV.
XV. EIGHT O’CLOCK
XVI.
XVI.
XVI.
XVI. SPRING MORNING
XVII.
XVII.
XVII.
XVII. ASTRONOMY
XVIII.
XVIII.
XVIII.
XVIII.
XX.
XX.
XX.
XX.
XXI.
XXI.
XXI.
XXI. New Year’s Eve
XXII.
XXII.
XXII.
XXII.
XXII. R. L. S.
XXIII.
XXIII.
XXIII.
XXIII. The Olive
XXIV.
XXIV.
XXIV. EPITHALAMIUM
XXIX.
XXIX.
XXIX.
XXV.
XXV.
XXV. THE ORACLES
XXVI.
XXVI.
XXVI. I Counsel You Beware
XXVII.
XXVII.
XXVII.
XXVIII.
XXVIII.
XXVIII.
XXX.
XXX.
XXX. SINNER’S RUE
XXXI.
XXXI.
XXXI. HELL’S GATE
XXXII.
XXXII.
XXXIII.
XXXIII.
XXXIII.
XXXIV.
XXXIV.
XXXIV. THE FIRST OF MAY
XXXIX.
XXXIX.
XXXIX.
XXXV.
XXXV.
XXXV.
XXXVI.
XXXVI.
XXXVI. REVOLUTION
XXXVII.
XXXVII.
XXXVII. EPITAPH ON AN ARMY OF MERCENARIES
XXXVIII.
XXXVIII.
XXXVIII.
You smile upon your friend to-day
The Essays
University College, London, — where Housman worked as a professor for over twenty years
A sketch of Housman, 1906
SWINBURNE
The publication, in 1866, of the late Mr Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads may fairly be called the most conspicuous event in the literary history of the reign of Queen Victoria. We now see that it was not so important an event as it once appeared: its results were not permanent, nor even of long duration; but it was the most moving novelty that the world of letters had seen for many a day or is likely to see for many another. At a time when Victorian verse was at its very tamest, when the two most widely read of recent poems were Enoch Arden and Hiawatha, this trumpet of insurrection excited in young and ardent minds an emotion comparable to what Wordsworth and Coleridge had felt when they witnessed the beginning of the French Revolution. Mr Thomas Hardy has told me that in those days, when he was a young man of six-and-twenty living in London, there was a whole army of young men like himself, not mutually acquainted, who nevertheless, as they met in the streets, could recognise one another as spiritual brethren by a certain outward sign. This sign was an oblong projection at the breast-pocket of the coat. To the gross world of London, enslaved by commerce, respectability, and middle-age, it might have been anything; but the sons of fire who had similar oblongs protruding from their own breast-pockets knew what it was: it was Moxton’s first edition of Poems and Ballads, worn where it should be worn, just over the heart.
When Mr Swinburne died, April 1909, at the age of 72, he might as well have been dead for a quarter of a century. For a quarter of a century and more he had written nothing that mattered. There were not many to buy his books, and fewer still to read them; the poetasters, except the very poorest, had ceased to try to imitate him; the literary world was much interested in other things, good, bad and indifferent, but little interested in the poetry of Mr Swinburne. He still commanded the lip-service of the journalists, who would describe him as our only great living poet; but this they said, not because they believed it was true, but because they hoped, by so saying, to inflict mental anguish on Mr William Watson or Mr Stephen Phillips.
Swinburne in fact was one of those not very numerous poets whom their contemporaries have treated with justice. The different attention which he received at different periods very fairly corresponded to differences, at those periods, in the quality of his writing. He was neither steadily overrated, like Byron, nor steadily underrated, like Shelley, nor, like Wordsworth, derided while he wrote well and celebrated when he wrote well no longer: he received the day’s wages for the day’s work. His first book fell dead, as it deserved; his first good book, Atalanta in Calydon, earned him celebrity; his best book, Poems and Ballads, was his most famous and influential book; and the decline of his powers, slow in Songs before Sunrise and Bothwell and Erectheus, accelerated in his later writings, was followed, not immediately, but after an interval sufficient to give him the chance of recovery, by a corresponding decline, first slow and then rapid, in public interest and esteem.
There can be no doubt that the enthusiasm provoked by Poems and Ballads, like the loud and transient outcry which frightened its first publisher into withdrawing it from circulation, was due in great measure to adventitious circumstances and to a feature of the book which is now seen to be merely accidental. The poems were largely and even chiefly concerned with a thing which one set of people call love, and another set of people call immorality, each set declaring that the other name is quite wrong, so that people belonging to neither set do not exactly know what to call it; but perhaps one may avoid extremes by calling it Aphrodite. Now in the general life of mankind Aphrodite is quite able to take care of herself; but in literature, at any rate in the literature of that Anglo-Saxon race to which we have the high privilege and heavy responsibility of belonging, she wages an unequal contest with another great divinity, who is called purity by her friends and hypocrisy by her enemies, and whom, again to avoid extremes, one may perhaps call Mrs Grundy. In the year 1866 the vicissitud
es of their secular conflict had brought Mrs Grundy to the top: she appeared to be sitting on Aphrodite as firmly as the Babylonian woman on her seven mountains in the Book of Revelations; and Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads were a powerful and timely demonstration in favour of the under dog – if indeed I may apply such a term to either of the fair antagonists. Here was a subject which most poets had ceased to talk about, and here was a poet talking about it at the very top of a very sonorous voice: the stone which the builders rejected was become the head of the corner. And although the enthusiasm which this intervention evoked in one camp, like the scandal which it occasioned in the other, was excessive – for Aphrodite has the knack of causing both her friends and her enemies to lose their heads and to make more fuss about her than she is worth – still the stroke was both effective and salutary, and entitles Swinburne to a secure though modest place among the liberators of mankind. The reasonable licence which English literature enjoys, and which it so seldom abuses, is the result of a gradual emancipation which began with Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads.
Those to whom this work appealed by its subject and contents, as distinct from its form, were of two classes: there were the simple adherents of Aphrodite, and there were those grave men, correct in behaviour and earnest in thought, who regard the relations of the sexes as the most serious and important element in human life. It was the irony of the situation that Swinburne himself belonged to neither class. He was not a libertine, and he was not an earnest thinker about life; he was merely a writer in search of a subject, and a tinder-box that any spark would set on fire. When he had written his book upon this subject, he had done with it, and it hardly appears again in the twenty volumes of his later verse: he was ready for a new subject. In Songs before Sunrise, his next volume, his attitude towards Aphrodite was austere, and the finest poem in the book is the Prelude in which he takes his leave of her. Poems and Ballads were the effervescence with which a quick and shallow nature responded to a certain influence arising partly from the Greek and Latin classics, partly from medieval legend, partly from the French literature of the nineteenth century. That effervescence subsided, and around a new subject, Liberty, a new influence, chiefly Mazzini’s, provoked a new effervescence, not nearly so sparkling. The fact is that, whatever may be the comparative merits of the two deities, Liberty is by no means so interesting as Aphrodite, and by no means so good a subject for poetry. There is a lack of detail about Liberty, and she has indeed no positive quality at all. Liberty consists in the absence of obstructions; it is merely a preliminary to activities whose character it does not determine; and to write poems about Liberty is very much as if one should write an Ode to Elbow-room or a panegyric on space of three dimensions. And in truth poets never do write poems about Liberty, they only pretend to do so: they substitute images.
Thy face is as a sword smiting in sunder
Shadows and chains and dreams and iron things;
The sea is dumb before thy face, the thunder
Silent, the skies are narrower than thy wings.
Then, when they feel that the reader is starving for something more tangible, they generally begin to talk of Athens, which, as it happens, was a slave-state; and in the last resort they fall back on denunciation of tyranny, an abominable institution, no doubt, but at any rate less featureless than Liberty, and a godsend to people who have to pretend to write about her.
But even tyranny is an exhaustible subject, and seven thousand verses exhaust it; and Swinburne, since he could not be still, was forced to be eloquent about other things. He appointed himself to laureateship of the sea; he cultivated a devotion to babies and young children; finally, under stress of famine and in desperation at the dearth of themes, he fled to what Johnson calls the last refuge of a scoundrel, and wrote patriotic poems in imitation of Campbell. And, in addition to all this, he composed a great number of verses about the verses of other poets.
Not one of these subjects was well chosen. The sea is a natural object; and Swinburne had no eye for nature and no talent for describing it. Children and babies are not appropriately celebrated in verse so ornate and so verbose as Swinburne’s. As for his patriotic poetry, it may be unfair to call it insincere, but certainly it has no air of sincerity: it is the sort of patriotic poetry one would expect from a man who had written volumes in honour of other nations before he wrote a line in honour of his own.
In truth there was only one theme which Swinburne thoroughly loved and understood; and that was literature. Here was the true centre of his interests, and the source of his genuine and spontaneous emotions. But literature, unfortunately, is neither a fruitful nor even an appropriate subject for poetry. Swinburne himself was uneasily aware of this; and consequently, when he heard it said that his work was grounded not upon life but upon books, it made him angry, and he began to splutter as follows: ‘The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard’s distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he, know that books are to poets as much a part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain.’ Well, of course, it is a sad thing to be a spiritually still-born child of dirt and dullness, and it is peculiarly depressing to be dead in heart and brain when one has only half a brain to be dead in; but it is no use bemoaning one’s condition, and we must pass on to consider the parallel which Swinburne draws.
Books, he says, are to poets as much part of life as pictures are to painters. Just so: they are to poets that part of life which is not fitted to become the subject of their art. Painters do not paint pictures of paintings, and similarly poets had better not write poems on poems. And Swinburne did worse than take books for his subject: he dragged this subject into the midst of all other subjects, and covered earth and sky and man with the dust of the library. He cannot watch a sunset at sea without beginning to think of Beaumont and Fletcher. He walks along a country road at Midsummer, and it sets him talking about Chaucer, because Chaucer may possibly have done the same thing. He writes an ode for the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his own school, Eton, in which he contrives to drag in Shakespeare (who was educated at Harrow) but mentions only one Etonian. And who do you think that one Etonian is? Shelley, whom Eton did not quite succeed in tormenting out of his mind: Shelley, who except for his father’s influence and intervention, would twice have been expelled: Shelley, whose atheism was traced, by an Eton headmaster, to the difficulty which he had in reconciling the existence of God with the existence of Eton. In short, Swinburne was perpetually talking shop: the bookish spirit in which he looked on nature and mankind, with his head full of his own trade, is essentially the same as the spirit in which The Tailor and Cutter annually criticises the portraits in the Royal Academy, interested, not in the artist, nor in the subject, but in the cut of the subject’s clothes.
I have been speaking of the themes of his lyrical poetry, because it is only as a lyrist that Swinburne is important. The themes of his dramatic and narrative works were not ill chosen, and the unsatisfactoriness of those poems was not due to their subject but to Swinburne’s lack of talent for narrative and the drama. His plays have a certain empty dignity, but he was not a dramatist nor even, like Browning, a psychologist: his characters are talking masks. In his only considerable narrative poem, Tristram of Lyonesse, the prologue, which in essence is lyric, is worth all the rest of the book put together; just as Atalanta in Calydon is raised far above his other dramas by the brilliant beauty of its very undramatic lyrics. It is of his lyrical poetry I am speaking when I say that after the first series of Poems and Ballads he was chiefly occupied with bad subjects or with subjects not suited to his genius.
But it has long been a commonplace that the strong side of Swinburne’s poetry was not its matter but its
manner; and though the matter of Poems and Ballads had much to do with the celebrity of the book, it is to its diction and versification that it will mainly owe its place in literature. Of these it is very difficult to speak adequately and justly; to keep the balance between admiration for their extraordinary merit and originality, and due recognition of the fact that they belong essentially to the second order, not the first.
If a man does not hear the melody of Swinburne’s verse, he must be deaf; he would not hear the melody of any verse. But if, as many do, he thinks its melody is the best, he must have a gross ear. The man who now calls Swinburne the most musical of poets would, if he had been born one hundred and fifty years earlier, have said the same of Pope. To the ears of his contemporaries Pope’s verse was perfection: the inferiority of Milton’s and Shakespeare’s was not a thing to be disputed about but to be explained and excused. The melody of Pope and Swinburne have this in common, and owed their acceptation to this, that they address themselves frankly and almost exclusively to what may be called the external ear. This, in different ways and by different methods, they fill and delight: it is a pleasure to hear them, a pleasure to read them aloud. But there, in that very fact, you can tell that their music is only of the second order. To read aloud poets whose music is of the first, poets so much unlike one another as Milton and Blake, is not a pleasure but an embarrassment, because no reader can hope to do them justice. Their melody is addressed to the inner chambers of the sense of hearing, to the junction between the ear and the brain; and you should either hire an angel from heaven to read them to you, or let them read themselves in silence. None understood their superiority better than Swinburne himself, the finest of whose critical qualities was his capacity to recognise excellence unlike his own. His devotees might call him the most melodious of English poets, but he thought that the most melodious lines in English were the first five lines of Lycidas; he acknowledged in the Border Ballads a strain of music which no later poetry could reproduce; and he recognised that the best versification of modern times is to be found in the irregular and simple-seeming measures of the Ancient Mariner.
Among Swinburne’s technical achievements the most conspicuous, if not the greatest, was his development of anapaestic verse. It was he who first made the anapaest fit for serious poetry. Before his time it had been used with some success for the lightest purposes, but when used for purposes other than the lightest it had seldom been managed with skill. At its best it had a simple and rather shallow music.