by Peter Parker
2
The Book
As Housman suggested, A Shropshire Lad stood apart from the literary period in which it was published. English poetry in the 1890s is associated principally with the so-called Decadents, who took their lead from French literature of the period, notably the Symbolist poets and J.-K. Huysmans’ novel À rebours (1884), in which the protagonist dedicates his life to art, artifice and the stimulation of the senses. An important influence nearer to home was Walter Pater, the English critic whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) suggested in its ‘Conclusion’ (withdrawn from the 1877 edition but reinstated in the 1888 one) that readers should aspire to a life dedicated to the sensations of the moment. ‘To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life,’ Pater declared. ‘While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems, by a lifted horizon, to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.’ One of the leading poets and critics of the period, Arthur Symons, dedicated his first volume of poems ‘To Walter Pater in all gratitude and admiration’.
Much of the poetry Symons and his contemporaries wrote extolled exquisite artifice over natural beauty, abandoning the old traditions of English pastoral in order to celebrate the modern urban world. ‘I am always charmed to read beautiful poems about nature in the country,’ Symons declared in the preface to the revised and enlarged edition of Silhouettes, his volume of poems published the same year as A Shropshire Lad. ‘Only, personally, I prefer the town to the country; and in the town we have to find for ourselves, as best we may, the décor which is the town equivalent of the great natural décor of the fields and hills. Here it is that artificiality comes in; and if any one sees no beauty in the effects of artificial light, in all the variable, most human, and yet most factitious town landscapes, I can only pity him, and go on my own way.’
When Symons wondered ‘why we should write exclusively about the natural blush, if the delicately acquired blush of rouge should have any attraction for us’, he was conjuring up a world in which theatre and artifice – both of which had connotations of ‘immorality’ – were held up for admiration, and his poems celebrate in particular the nightlife of the metropolis with its street lights, its dance theatres and its masquerades. This was the world Symons portrayed in his 1895 volume, London Nights, which was inspired both by his visits as a critic to music halls and his liaison with a dancer, and had, as he put it, ‘no very salutary reputation among the blameless moralists of the press’.
It was a world which found its ideal illustrator in Aubrey Beardsley, who was art editor of the two magazines that became showcases for the Decadent literature of the 1890s: The Yellow Book, a literary quarterly which ran from 1894 to 1897, and The Savoy, a monthly which lasted for only eight issues in 1896. The leading figure of the Decadent movement, Oscar Wilde, contributed to neither publication, but a widespread and incorrect report that he had been carrying a copy of The Yellow Book when he was led away after his arrest in April 1895 resulted in that magazine’s demise two years later. In October 1896, when it became clear The Savoy was failing, Grant Richards was asked by a young writer called Hugh Crackanthorpe whether he might step in to save the magazine by becoming its publisher. Richards decided he could not afford to do so, and A Shropshire Lad would prove to be a far better investment.
Wilde’s trial for homosexual offences, after the collapse of his ill-advised libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, seemed to confirm the general public’s notion that Decadent literature was an endorsement of, or incitement to, immorality. Some writers were already inimical to or distanced from this hitherto dominant literary movement, most significantly those associated with W.E. Henley’s National Observer, which had congratulated Queensberry and denounced Wilde as ‘the High Priest of the Decadents’. Another collection of writers congregated around W.B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys, who had formed the Rhymers’ Club in 1890. The fact that these poets held regular meetings at a pub, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street, and admitted no women suggests a more robustly masculine grouping than the Decadents, but there was some overlap: Arthur Symons, who had founded The Savoy, and two of the leading Decadent poets, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, were all members of the Club and contributors to the two anthologies of poetry it published in 1892 and 1894. The literary establishment was represented by the distinctly undecadent Alfred Austin, who had been appointed Poet Laureate in January 1896, succeeding Tennyson in the post and providing undistinguished service until his death in 1913, when he was himself succeeded by Robert Bridges. Austin may have been the official laureate, but many people regarded Rudyard Kipling as Britain’s true national poet, beating the drum for Empire, and giving a voice to those who had enlisted in the ranks to defend it, in his volumes of Barrack-Room Ballads, first collected in 1892. A second series of Kipling’s ballads was published the same year as A Shropshire Lad, as was Hilaire Belloc’s The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, containing comic verses not unlike those Housman had occasionally written.
It was against this literary backdrop that A Shropshire Lad first appeared and immediately stood out as something wholly original. ‘Here is a writer who stands outside all the poetic vogues of today,’ wrote ‘A.M.’ in the Bookman. ‘He is neither a mystic, nor a symbolist, nor a devotee of ancient forms, nor an interpreter of the ideal significance of the music-halls. But he is a poet. I have seen no book of verses for years that breathes at least more spontaneity, and very few with as much individuality.’ A Church of England newspaper called the Guardian agreed that it was ‘pleasant, after all the books of art-poetry that are now the fashion, to come upon a poet who sings with a natural note,’ while Norman Gale noted approvingly in the Academy that ‘Mr Housman has no more ambition to make his way into a cloud of mysticism than to waste his time and his tune in the music-halls. It is his desire to keep close to flowers and the soil of their parentage.’
It was not just that A Shropshire Lad appeared to have blown some invigorating country air into the stuffy metropolitan rooms in which modern poetry self-consciously languished; the book was felt to be unlike anything that had gone before. ‘The little volume before us contains, on well-nigh every page, essentially and distinctively new poetry,’ wrote Hubert Bland, in an unsigned review in New Age. ‘The individual voice rings out true and clear. It is not an inspiring voice, perhaps; it speaks not to us of hope in the future, of glory in the past, or of joy in the present. But it says and sings things that have not been sung or said before, and this with a power and directness, and with a heart-penetrating quality for which one may seek in vain through the work of any contemporary lyrist, Mr [W.E.] Henley perhaps excepted.’ This was the notice that in the last weeks of his life Housman described as ‘the best review I ever saw of my poems’. The overall reaction to the book was summed up by William Rothenstein, who wrote that the appearance of A Shropshire Lad in the literary landscape meant that ‘people who had sneered at minor poetry were silenced. Here was fine poetry, and a poet taking his place quietly as an immortal, as a great fiddler goes to his seat in the orchestra’.
While some of the book’s themes may have seemed familiar from other poetry published at the time, the approach was entirely different. Many 1890s poets wrote in a melancholy vein, but they tended to luxuriate in their affected gloom, whereas Housman was stoical and defiant. As in A Shropshire Lad, some of the unhappiness expressed by these poets was caused by doomed or thwarted love or the spectre of early death, but their mood seemed partly to arise from a sense that the century itself was dying, whereas Housman’s verse was timeless and universal: ‘Its narrow measure spans / Rue for eternity, and sorrow / Not mine, but man’s,’ as Housman himself put it. In spite of flaunting their ‘decadence’, a significant number of 1890s writers could be found sooner or later genuflecting or eve
n prostrating themselves at the foot of the cross, whereas Housman rejected Christianity conclusively. The so-called blasphemy of other Decadent poets looks like the result of a schoolboy dare compared with Housman’s clear-headed disdain and his pillaging of the scriptures to genuinely subversive effect.
Whatever other influences may have been detected in the book, the prevailing one of France was entirely absent. The book was not only distinctly English but specifically located by its title in the English countryside. Far from celebrating the metropolis, as contemporary poets did, it portrayed London as a place of unhappy exile from the countryside’s ‘valleys of springs of rivers’, its streets thronged with people so ‘undone with misery’ that they cannot, as friends left behind in Shropshire did, share one’s troubles, but only ‘look at you and wish you ill’ (XLI). There is absolutely nothing glamorous or exciting about London for the country lad who lies alone in his city bed yearning for lost companions and the ‘western brookland that bred [him] long ago’ (LII).
Another thing that marked out A Shropshire Lad as modern was the directness of the language Housman employed and the concision with which he used it, as several reviewers noted. Although some poets in the 1890s adopted a more current and forthright language than had been customary in nineteenth-century verse, others still clogged their poems with ‘thee’, ‘thou’, ‘thy’ and ‘thine’, ‘hath’ and ‘hast’, ‘doth’ and ‘dost’, ‘sayeth’, ‘seek’st’ and ‘ta’en’, and so on. Such words are occasionally found in Housman’s other poems, but A Shropshire Lad is entirely free of such ‘poetic’ archaisms. It is true that Housman sometimes uses such literary variations as ‘ere’, ‘aye’, ‘yon’, ‘tarry’ or ‘forth’, and that less usual archaisms are from time to time judiciously employed to suggest a rural setting, but otherwise the language of the volume is deceptively simple and straightforward. The complexities of the poems are principally to do with tone, which often sets up an uncertainty in the reader about what Housman, beneath what appears to be a delightful artlessness, is really saying.
Anyone opening a book with the title A Shropshire Lad might expect it to evoke the life of a single, if emblematic, individual, which is why many commentators have searched for a narrative within the volume. The notion that the book was intended to tell a story surfaced early, Grant Richards describing it in his review of the first edition as ‘a biography in verse, in sixty-three short poems, dealing with the loves and sorrows, the dramatic incidents, the daily labours of a Ludlow boy’. That may be broadly true, but later attempts to detail this narrative turn out to be more ingenious than convincing. The fact that Housman moved several poems around within the volume at proof stage has been adduced as evidence of some narrative plan, but if he spent time ordering and reordering the sequence in which the poems finally appeared, he was doing what any poet would when preparing a collection for publication. It is true that in the first poem in the volume, which describes and reflects upon Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, Housman is setting out his poetic stall. The poem is located from the very first line in Shropshire, introduces two themes – soldiering and the death of comrades – that will recur, and adopts a sceptical tone that colours the poet’s view of life and fate throughout the volume. Similarly, the two last poems of the book act as a commentary on what has gone before: in the first, the poet is castigated by a bluff friend for the morbid tenor of his verses, while in the second he identifies the intended audience for his poetry, the ‘luckless lads’ such as himself who have featured throughout the book. It is also true that the poems that come between can be divided (unequally) between those in the first part, which are largely set in rural Shropshire, and those in the second part, in which the poet looks back to this land of lost content from his exile in London, the hinge of the book provided by poem XXXVII, ‘As through the wild green hills of Wyre’, which is set on a train travelling from the shire to the capital.
The theory that the poems are arranged to portray some kind of personal development, ‘a persona who grows and matures with the experiences which the poems record’, is more difficult to sustain. It is only possible to claim that ‘a progressively tragic view of love is shown in the later Shropshire poems’ if one simply ignores those which don’t fit the pattern that is being imposed upon them. If Housman, meticulous in all he did, had intended some kind of verse narrative, why did he not enclose it more neatly with one introductory poem and one summarising poem, rather than one of the former and two of the latter? Why does the ‘hinge’ poem not appear at the midway point, and why was it not part of the volume’s original scheme but added only at the very last minute when the rest of the book had already been sent to the printers? One might also seek some explanation for the fact that, although each poem is given a number, some poems – for no reason anyone has explained – have also been given titles. These titles are not spread evenly throughout the book, but occur entirely at random. The clinching argument is that the poems’ ‘persona’ is not in the least consistent: at one moment he is a melancholy twenty-year-old reflecting on the transience of life (as in the second poem, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’), but then instantly changes into a more mature figure who hectors various lads in the voice of a recruiting sergeant (in the third, ‘Leave your home behind, lad’) or even a scoutmaster urging a slug-a-bed to get out into the fresh air (in the fourth, ‘Reveille’). The perspective changes from poem to poem with no detectable pattern, and all attempts to fit the poems into some kind of scheme merely end up looking forced.
A Shropshire Lad is not a poetic Bildungsroman, nor does it provide the sort of narrative that Schubert constructed from Wilhelm Müller’s poems in Die schöne Müllerin or Winterreise. Rather, it is a collection of poems loosely bound together by setting, theme and mood, and by the personality of the man who wrote them. ‘The Shropshire Lad is an imaginary figure, with something of my temper and view of life,’ Housman told an enquirer in 1933, though he was careful to add: ‘Very little in the book is biographical.’ As is so often the case with Housman, this was true only as far as it went, and part of the attraction of the book, at any rate in its early years, was that readers sensed there must be some sort of story not in the poems but behind them. In this it resembles another popular work of art of the same period, Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma’ Variations, which received its first performance in 1899. Elgar’s composition occupies a similar place in the history of English music to that of A Shropshire Lad in the history of English poetry, both being works of the nineteenth century that nevertheless mark the beginning of the modern. The Enigma Variations are dedicated to ‘my friends pictured within’, and each of the fourteen variations is a musical portrait of someone Elgar knew, identified in the score by a private nickname, a set of initials, or in one case three asterisks. The work’s proper title is Variations on an Original Theme for Orchestra (‘Enigma’), and it is the ‘unplayed theme’, as Elgar called it, that gives the piece its name, not the partly hidden identities of the ‘friends pictured within’ to whom it is dedicated. It is an enigma that remains unsolved. Before the work’s first performance, Elgar stated:
The ‘Enigma’ I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’, but is not played […] So the principal Theme never appears, even as in some late dramas – e.g. Maeterlinck’s ‘L’Intruse’ and ‘Les sept Princesses’ – the chief character is never on stage.
He never did explain it, any more than Housman publicly admitted what lay behind A Shropshire Lad, of which it might also be said that the chief character does not appear on stage. This did not prevent people from speculating in both cases. ‘It is evident that the “Shropshire Lad” has been hit very hard by a woman,’ the poet Richard Le Gallienne declared in one of the book’s first reviews. As we now know, he was – to say the least of it – wide
of the mark.
While Housman’s refusal to allow individual poems from the volume to be reprinted in anthologies – a stricture he did not apply to the contents of Last Poems – suggests that he regarded the book as a single entity, this is not at all the same thing as saying that the book forms a consistent narrative. Regardless of the author’s wishes, certain poems did take on an individual life beyond the volume, either because they were set to music by composers or because they became popular recital pieces. Housman did his best to prevent the latter fate, refusing permission for any of his poems to be read on the wireless. ‘Only the archangel Raphael could recite my poems properly,’ he wrote, and archangels seem to have been in short supply at the BBC. ‘Auribus’, who wrote ‘Wireless Notes’ for the Musical Times, described the Corporation’s poetry broadcasts in 1930 as ‘often unbearable’:
Some of the gentlemen who practise it are obsessed with the idea that they must use an artificial voice and an artificial intensity of feeling no matter what the character of the words they utter. Every line becomes an oracle. In every line the reciter manages to discover at least one word so heavy with fate that it must needs be voiced with the greatest apprehension. It usually occurs in the last foot. A poetry-speaker will announce in a perfectly natural way that he proposes to give us, say, a bit of Housman. Then, summoning all his courage and lowering his voice about a fifth, he will declaim:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
as if he had just finished murdering Duncan.