by Peter Parker
The poems of A Shropshire Lad may not tell a story, but they are carefully related to each other. The geographical setting announced in the book’s title is the most obvious of the ways in which the poems are bound together, although the volume contains several topographical anomalies: ‘Bredon Hill’ (XXI) is a Worcestershire landmark, while ‘The Isle of Portland’ (LIX) is a tied island off the coast of Dorset, a very long way from landlocked Shropshire. If the geographical bounds of the poems are a little flexible, Housman Country nevertheless remains distinct and coherent. While A Shropshire Lad was not Housman’s own title, he clearly thought it a good and appropriate one. The book certainly takes as its principal subject matter the travails of young men either living in or exiled from the English countryside, with place-names borrowed from the real county of Shropshire; but what the title really announces is a theme or mood, rather as Arthur Symons’s contemporaneous London Nights does, evoking a poetic world rather than anything more specific. Housman’s assertion that ‘The Shropshire Lad is an imaginary figure, with something of my temper and view of life’ supports this view. In fact, Housman first wrote ‘an imaginary character’, which he presumably altered because ‘figure’ is less embodied than ‘character’, suggesting a presiding sensibility rather than an identifiable individual.
The ‘Shropshire Lad’ in Housman’s formulation is essentially the speaker in the poems. He is indeed sometimes a lad, but at other times is an older man who is looking back to his youth, a double perspective that provides additional poignancy, emphasising the unstoppable passage of irrecoverable time. The Lad is also at one moment a friend of the other lads he addresses or writes about, at others an outsider looking on with admiration, affection, envy or fellow-feeling. On only four occasions are these lads allotted names: Fred, Dick, Ned, Maurice. More often they are referred to or addressed as, with varying degrees of warmth, ‘lad’ or ‘lads’, ‘my lad’ or ‘my lads’, or – simply and most intimately – ‘you’. These lads suffer the troubles characteristic of young men of the period: they fall in love with young women who treat them with heartless flirtatiousness, or abandon them for other lovers, or simply die; they enlist in the army and end up ‘dead and rotten’ on distant battlefields; they get into fights or worse, and end up in gaol or on the gallows; they commit suicide. Such fates make the speaker acutely aware of the fleeting nature of love and life, and this pervasive consciousness of the ephemeral nature of existence is reinforced by the changing seasons. For the speaker, the cycle of birth, death and renewal observed in the natural world that traditionally provides hope – particularly for those with Christian faith – merely reflects the diurnal treadmill on which people trudge round and round until death puts a final stop to what has become a pointless, repetitive exercise. As the taunting blackbird sings in ‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow’ (VII):
‘Lie down, lie down, young yeoman;
What use to rise and rise?
Rise man a thousand mornings
Yet down at last he lies…’
There will certainly be no bright new dawn of resurrection for those who do at last lie down: no one in these poems rises from the bed of clay. This finality does, however, provide a small consolation because if there is no heaven, then there is no hell either, and the poet is able to reassure those going on that final journey that ‘nought’s to dread’: ‘In all the endless road you tread / There’s nothing but the night’ (LX). The speaker has sympathy with those who, faced with such a grim prospect, take their own lives, but his own philosophy is one of stoical endurance. Dwelling on the inevitability of death, he suggests, only ‘lays lads under ground’ all the sooner: far better to ‘Think no more, lad; laugh, be jolly’ (XLIX). This is, perhaps, rather a difficult injunction to obey: it would take a certain amount of willpower simply to endure, let alone rejoice in, the world the poems inhabit.
It was remarked from the very first that A Shropshire Lad was, as Hubert Bland put it in a phrase Housman would surely have enjoyed, ‘wanting in the note of gladness’, and it has been a commonplace ever since that the book is overwhelmingly gloomy. A review in The Times of the second edition was headlined ‘The Funereal Muse’ and, although unwilling to ‘reproach [Housman] for preferring – within reason – the tragic side of life as a subject […] to its happier aspect’, warned that his ‘passion for the society and conversation of Charon will not improve his admirable poetry’. When Ezra Pound published a satirical poem about A Shropshire Lad in his Canzoni (1911), he reduced ‘Mr Housman’s Message’ to a three-stanza lament which itemised what he saw as the book’s essential ingredients: people die before their time, as do birds sitting in hawthorn trees; lads tend to be either hanged or shot; the human plight is a pitiful one; Shropshire is a great deal nicer than London; so, with all this in mind, we should just smile at nature’s grim beauty. The poem, which comes with a repeated chorus of the repeated word ‘woe’, would have been more effective if Pound had imitated the manner as well as the matter of Housman’s poetry, but the implied complaint has been repeated by others.
Some even believed Housman was not being altogether serious. An anonymous reviewer in the Philadelphia Citizen conceded that the Lad ‘moves our compassion by his many woes’, but concluded that the whole book was some kind of elaborate joke and that Housman was like the lachrymose Mock-Turtle in Alice in Wonderland, of whom the Gryphon says: ‘Bless you, he haint got no sorrows. It’s only his imagination.’ As evidence, the reviewer cited the volume’s penultimate poem, ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’, without apparently turning the page to discover the book’s true envoi. In that final poem Housman adopts the guise of a market gardener who has worked hard to cultivate his flowers, only to find that they do not sell: ‘The hue was not the wear’. He nevertheless determines to carry on growing them:
So up and down I sow them
For lads like me to find,
When I shall lie below them,
A dead man out of mind.
[…]
And fields will yearly bear them
As light-leaved spring comes on,
And luckless lads will wear them
When I am dead and gone.
Housman here identifies the audience for his poems, aware that there are other young men like him who will be familiar with and appreciate what others may decry.
The poems’ melancholy has always been part of their appeal, and Housman recognises, as some commentators have not, that there is a difference between sadness and misery. As the popularity of innumerable novels and films repeatedly demonstrates, people enjoy the sadness of others when it is at a safe fictional remove. This may be especially true in England, where ‘having a jolly good cry’ is often recommended as an enjoyable recreation – perhaps for the very reason that it provides a holiday from the emotional self-denial thought characteristic of the English race. While it is hard to imagine Housman himself giving in to this kind of thing, we have already seen that he could be moved to tears – and he believed that the best poetry always produced such physical reactions.
The imaginary critic who suggests in the volume’s penultimate poem that, for a change, the poet might ‘pipe a tune to dance to’, receives the answer that alcohol rather than poetry is what makes a man merry – at any rate temporarily:
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.
The brew the poet provides in his verses, however, is more effective than this temporary remedy because it acts like an inoculation rather than an opiate. He goes on to tell the story of Mithridates, king of Pontus, who protected himself homeopa
thically from any attempt to poison him by taking regular small amounts of deadly substances. What Housman characteristically fails to add, though no doubt expected his readers to know, is that Mithridates’ prophylactic strategy eventually proved his undoing. He may have ‘died old’, but not as he had wished: defeated and captured by the Romans, he was unable to commit suicide by poison because he had rendered himself immune – a grim irony of the kind Housman particularly relished.
This sort of dark comedy is one of the reasons A Shropshire Lad is not the dispiriting read a brief synopsis might suggest. Irony, rather than alcohol or poison, is the remedy Housman himself employed when facing the worst, both in his poetry and in his life, but this has not always been appreciated. The Citizen reviewer, for example, tumbled neatly into the trap that Housman had cunningly laid in ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’. The poem appears to be an apologia for what has gone before, in which Terence Hearsay, the supposed author, defends his muse against those who complain that it is too glum. This Terence, however, seems at first quite unlike someone who could have written the book’s other poems. He and his critic are depicted as a couple of Shropshire yokels, and there is a suggestion that their conversation is taking place in a pub. The complaints about Terence’s poems are couched in an idiom that undermines them: while in essence some of the criticisms seem reasonable, they are exaggeratedly voiced by someone who appears to be both unlettered and drunk.
Housman occasionally uses rhyming couplets elsewhere in the volume, but never to such rollicking effect as in the first two stanzas of this poem, in which the complaint is made and answered. Terence, far from being the sophisticated author of the affecting lyric poems we have just read, is a country bumpkin who likes nothing more than to drink so much that he has to be ‘carried half way home’ from Ludlow Fair, losing his necktie in the process, and ends up sleeping it off while lying ‘in lovely muck’, presumably in a roadside ditch somewhere. It has been suggested that Housman used Terence as a distancing device between himself and the poems, creating a country lad who could voice sentiments that perhaps a classical scholar could not; or that by adopting the guise of this Shropshire lad he could make the poems more rurally ‘authentic’ and hide the inconvenient fact that the author was actually a metropolitan sophisticate. If this was the intention, Housman seems not to have carried it through with much thoroughness or consistency. Indeed, this poem enacts a shift in voice and perspective, from the cheerfully inebriated Shropshire yokel of the second stanza to the (in every sense) more sober and well-read philosopher of the third and fourth stanzas. As William Archer noted: ‘Mr Housman writes, for the most part, under the guise of “A Shropshire Lad” – the rustic forefather of his book. But this is evidently a mere mask. Mr Housman is no Shropshire Burns singing at the plough. He is a man of culture. He moves in his rustic garb with no clodhopper’s gait, but with the ease of an athlete; and I think he has an Elzevir classic in the pocket of his smock frock.’* The rural clodhopper’s gait is apparent only in this single poem, deliberately adopted as a jokey rebuttal of potential critics. Some commentators have been surprised that the author of A Shropshire Lad could also have written very funny parodies and squibs, but the two apparently disparate styles of Housman poetry come together in these verses, which were written several months after the majority of the book’s other poems.
More representative of the volume’s dark humour is the sprightly little poem published as no. XVIII:
Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.
But now the fancy passes by,
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they’ll say that I
Am quite myself again.
The rueful comedy here is very characteristic, while the structure and rhyme scheme make the otherwise surprising conclusion inevitable – and indeed logical. What seems artless, almost a mere ditty (and one that has often been set to music), is in fact tonally sophisticated: the poem appears light-hearted, but this is the kind of lightness that is adopted to conceal deep sorrow, both from others and perhaps from the speaker himself. If not as stirringly plangent as some of the other poems, it nevertheless delivers a powerful little kick.
This literary strategy of surface directness concealing something altogether more complicated, hard truths wrapped in an attractive package of ironic humour, is one Housman used to great effect not only in his poems but also in his lectures and his correspondence. Indeed, he uses it so often that it becomes almost reflex, less a deliberate strategy than part of his nature as both a writer and a man. It is here that his tone comes in, often difficult to gauge with any real certainty – which is no doubt just how Housman liked it. The very first poem in A Shropshire Lad suggests that Housman’s verse may not be quite as transparent and straightforward as it seems. Its account of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee lures the unwary reader in with an apparently hearty and patriotic commemoration of the event. The tone of the poem, however, is slippery: what at first seems a Kiplingesque celebration of Shropshire’s professional soldiers, and of the Queen and Empire for which they are fighting, turns out on more detailed inspection to be distinctly subversive, undermining the popular sentiment of ‘God save the Queen’ with a hint of dissent. The faintly blasphemous statement that those who died to save the Queen ‘shared the work with God’ is reinforced by the lines ‘The saviours come not home tonight: / Themselves they could not save’. The use of the word ‘saviours’, even without an upper-case initial, hints that common soldiers too are doing Christ’s work, while the second line is a sly appropriation of the Gospels’ account of the Crucifixion, in which the chief priests sarcastically observe: ‘He saved others; himself he cannot save.’
‘1887’ picks out some themes and sets the tone for the entire volume. It immediately locates the book in Shropshire, referring in its opening words to beacons burning ‘From Clee to heaven’. Soldiers will appear frequently in the poems that follow, often fondly or wistfully regarded as real or potential ‘friends’, as they are here. The notion that Shropshire is a county that produces good, honest men, and whose generalised but memorable features include ‘skies that knit their heartstrings right’ and ‘fields that bred them brave’, will also run throughout the book. The poem introduces other features such as ‘farm’, ‘town’ and ‘land’, words that will recur in the poems almost as metonyms, standing in as a kind of shorthand for the rural world Housman is evoking. The second poem, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, is one of Housman’s best-loved lyrics, three perfect stanzas that announce the book’s recurring motif of the evanescence of life. The notion of white blossom and snow mirroring each other and proving at once overwhelming in their effect and wholly ephemeral is repeated in a poem that appears much later in the volume, in which the speaker, now exiled in London, imagines the rural year heedlessly turning without him.
’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town
The golden broom should blow;
The hawthorn sprinkled up and down
Should charge the land with snow.
He pictures other, luckier, Shropshire lads and lasses getting out into the spring countryside and pleads:
O tarnish late on Wenlock Edge,
Gold that I never see;
Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge
That will not shower on me.
The poignancy here is that the speaker knows full well, as he has already acknowledged in the earlier poem about the cherry, that flowers fade and that his plea that they should linger is a vain one: the gold of the broom is already tarnished and the hawthorn will vanish as quickly as a snowdrift. Knowing that you cannot have something does not necessarily make you stop wanting it, may indeed make that longing all the keener.
The faint echo between poems is something that occurs elsewhere in the book: the contrasting ploughmen in ‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow’ (VII) and ‘
Is my team ploughing’ (XXVII); the soldiers responding differently to bugle calls in ‘The Recruit’ (III), ‘On the idle hill of summer’ (XXXV) and ‘The Day of Battle’ (LVI); the lovers gathering wild flowers in ‘Oh see how thick the goldcup flowers’ (V), ‘March’ (X) and ‘The Lent Lily’ (XXIX). Other echoes sound between the lad who has ‘lost for everlasting / The heart out of his breast’ in ‘There pass the careless people’ (XIV) and the one who asks a friend ‘To this lost heart be kind’ in ‘If truth in hearts that perish’ (XXXIII). The speaker in ‘Say, lad, have you things to do?’ (XXIV) offers much the same to his friend as the more disembodied one does in ‘From far, from eve and morning’ (XXXII). The wind that blows ‘through holt and hanger’ and down the centuries in ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’ (XXXI) is felt in several poems. It blows in, delivering the friend offering his hand and heart in ‘From far, from eve and morning’; it blows out of the west land, either ‘Warm with the blood of the lads I knew’ (XXXVIII) or so cold that it is ‘an air that kills’ (XL); it accompanies the wing-sandalled messenger of death in ‘The Merry Guide’ (XLII), and makes nettles perform a danse macabre on the graves of those who have killed themselves for love (XVI).
Some of the best-known of the poems are thematically related. The passing of time and the changes this brings link ‘Bredon Hill’ (XXI) and ‘Is my team ploughing’ (XXVII). In the first of these poems two lovers enjoying a summer idyll ignore the church bells summoning them to church, thinking they can wait until the bells call them there for their wedding; but winter comes and, instead of the joyful pealing they had imagined, the now solitary young man hears ‘the one bell only’ tolling for his girl, who has died at Christmas. The following summer the bells continue to peal, an intolerable reminder of the previous year’s happiness, and the young man eventually relents: ‘I hear you, I will come.’ A similarly dark ironic tale is told in ‘Is my team ploughing’, which takes the form of a conversation between a dead ploughboy and his best friend. The ghost asks about everyday life continuing in his absence, hoping perhaps for evidence that his passing has been marked. Life goes on much the same, the friend replies; but he becomes evasive when the dead lad asks after his girl, for both she and the friend have found solace in the same bed. The changes wrought among lovers by time also provides the theme of ‘Along the field as we came by’ (XXV), in which the same play is made between the bridal bed and the bed of clay. ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’ (XIX) salutes a young man who by dying before his time can at least be consoled that he will not be around to see his sporting records surpassed: he is one of those who, like the young men in ‘The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair’ (XXIII), will ‘die in their glory and never be old’.