by Peter Parker
Elsewhere premature death provides no such consolations. The lad in ‘Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?’ (XLIV) kills himself in order to avoid disgrace, while the young shepherd who goes ‘naked to the hangman’ in ‘On moonlit heath and lonesome bank’ (IX) and the convict who dies in gaol in ‘The Isle of Portland’ (LIX) meet their deaths utterly alone. That the troubles besetting Housman’s lads are nothing new is evident from ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’ and ‘Loitering with a vacant eye’ (LI), in which young men learn that the Ancients suffered and endured just as they now do. In the first a lad recognises that the gale blowing through the trees is the same as the one that disturbed them ‘When Uricon the city stood’, and that a Roman soldier was similarly burdened with untold troubles until death relieved him. The latter poem is set in the Grecian gallery at the British Museum, where a marble statue tells a visiting lad that he too is exiled from his home but that he simply has to endure his lot. Both poems suggest that stoicism is a classical virtue to be emulated.
Another, related way in which the individual poems of A Shropshire Lad cohere into a whole is by language, by Housman’s repeated use of specific words. These words sound like beats and echoes throughout the book – and indeed beyond, providing additional close links with the poems Housman omitted from this volume but selected for publication in Last Poems, and those that appeared posthumously in More Poems and Additional Poems, some of which were written at the same time. The most frequently recurring word is, of course, ‘lad’ or ‘lads’, appearing sixty-six times in sixty-three poems – and many more times in the poems collected in other volumes. While this is only to be expected, the repeated appearance of other words is more telling. ‘Friend’ and its variants (‘friends’, ‘friendship’, ‘friendly’ and ‘friendless’), for example, appear far more often than ‘lover’ – though the distinction between the two is not always clear. This suggests that the bonds of friendship in Housman Country count for a great deal more than those of conventional romantic love, and it is significant how infrequently the words ‘lass’, ‘girl’ and ‘girls’ appear compared with ‘lad’ or ‘lads’: a mere eight times. Housman occasionally refers to someone’s ‘love’ in the sense of a female sweetheart, but these loves tend to betray their lads, and it is not merely the frequency with which certain words occur that is notable, but also the context in which they are found. Hearts and hands – both given and taken – are often mentioned, and looks are cast, but these exchanges tend to be inconclusive or forlorn.
Familiar land, fields, shires and sky are a regular feature of the poems, evoking the rural setting, but they are often, like ‘home’, ‘far’, while the many roads that lead to (or more often ‘away’ from) them tend to be ‘long’, or even ‘endless’, and are usually trodden ‘alone’. ‘Long’ is also a regularly occurring measurement of time, generally endured rather than enjoyed, a period in which past pleasures have receded and regrets have accumulated. ‘More’ is almost invariably preceded by ‘no’, and ‘never’ seals off both past and future from the stoically borne present. The volume contains (as Housman puts it in one poem) sighs aplenty, but only two mentions of ‘tears’, a further hint that stoicism is preferable to giving in to grief. Although the poems sometimes suggest a deceptively sunlit landscape, they also frequently evoke or take place at ‘night’, and the ‘sleep’ that awaits lads when the day is done is often permanent, the ‘beds’ they lie in made of earth, dust or clay. Words connected with death and dying toll throughout the poems, as do ends and endings, while ‘ill’ is more often than not used to describe luck, how things are faring, or how lads are treated.
As with individual words, so with the book’s themes, on which Housman plays a set of variations: love and loss; youth and death; friendship and betrayal; crime and punishment; the passing of time; the military calling; the English landscape; exile from places of past happiness; the country versus the city; the absence of God and the indifference of the natural world to the fate of men. These themes overlap and reinforce each other, providing links between individual poems often separated by several pages. Taken together, they present a view of the world that is both particular and universal. In one way or another the characters in Housman’s poems tend to come to grief, but one need not be a Shropshire rustic – or indeed a Classics don – to have felt the pangs of unrequited love, to have experienced that piercing sense of time lost and never to be recovered, or to have been touched by an overwhelming sense of mortality. The Shropshire Lad may rail against fate, but he knows that he can do nothing to prevent it taking its inexorable course.
Another striking and attractive aspect of the book is that it draws on many literary sources. Housman named the principal ones as ‘Shakespeare’s songs, the Scottish Border ballads, and Heine’, but he also drew upon Greek and Latin verse, the Bible, and a wide range of English poets, sometimes marking passages in his own copies of these books as if for future use. Some influences are more general than specific: ‘I suppose that my classical training has been of some use in furnishing good models, and making me fastidious, and telling me what to leave out,’ Housman told one admirer. Elsewhere individual phrases can be traced to their sources. In 1958 Norman Marlow devoted much of his A.E. Housman: Scholar and Poet to this kind of scholarship, and his work has been expanded upon since, notably by Tom Burns Haber in his 1967 critical study, A.E. Housman, in a Housman Society publication, Housman and Heine: A Neglected Relationship (2011), and more generally by Archie Burnett in his scholarly edition of Housman’s poems (1997). Some of these echoes, such as those of George Augustus Simcox’s Poems and Romances (1869) and Philip Bourke Marston’s Song-Tide (1888), may have been difficult to detect even when the book was published and now require true dedication to ferret out. Marlow modestly described his own endeavours as ‘merely a necessary basis on which a future critic may build’, and to that end it is worth briefly considering the influence on Housman of one very familiar and much loved poem.
Like A Shropshire Lad, Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) is quintessentially English and became very popular in its time, running through some fifty editions during the first fifty years of its publication. Housman owned an 1807 edition of The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray with an Account of his Life and Writings and clearly knew the poems well enough to quote or refer to them in his correspondence, even when lying seriously ill in a nursing home. Housman also regarded Gray as an exemplar of literary continence whom he was happy to emulate. In February 1910, in response to one of the frequent enquiries he received about the distant prospect of a second volume of poems, he wrote: ‘The other day I had the curiosity to reckon up the complete pieces, printed and unprinted, which I have written since 1896, and they only come to 300 lines, so the next volume appears to be some way off. In barrenness at any rate, I hold a high place among English poets, excelling even Gray.’
Echoes of Gray, though not of his Elegy, have been detected in ‘On moonlight heath and lonesome bank’ (IX) and ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ (XL). However, it is hardly a coincidence that for ‘Diffugere Nives’, his translation of Horace’s ode, Housman should use the metre and rhyme scheme of the Elegy, and the influence of Gray’s poem is detectable in both A Shropshire Lad and later volumes of Housman’s verse. There seem to be at the very least similarities between Gray’s ploughmen – ‘How jocund did they drive their team afield’ – and Housman’s: ‘And blithe afield to ploughing / Against the morning beam / I strode beside my team’ (VII) and ‘Is my team ploughing, / That I was used to drive’ (XXVII). Similarly, Gray’s line ‘Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap’ may have inspired Housman’s repeated use of the same verb to describe the workings of nature: ‘And overhead the aspen heaves’ (XXVI), ‘His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves’ (XXXI), ‘The sigh that heaves the grasses’ and ‘On acres of the seeded grasses / The changing burnish heaves’. The first line of the epitaph at the end of Gray’s poem, ‘Here rests his head
upon the lap of earth’ may well have supplied Housman with the image he uses in the lines about the death of a friend: ‘Now to her lap the incestuous earth / The son she bore has ta’en’. Whether or not one agrees that these constitute genuine echoes rather than two English poets using a common literary currency, it can be said more surely that the mood of A Shropshire Lad is in direct descent from both the Elegy and Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (1747). Eton in the latter poem, like Housman’s blue remembered hills, is seen from afar, both geographically and in time, and represents a land of lost content where (as Gray imagines it) ‘regardless of their doom / The little victims play’.
Possible echoes of and allusions to Matthew Arnold, a poet Housman had long admired, are far more numerous. Writing of their time at Oxford, A.W. Pollard recalled: ‘His favourite English poet in these early days was Matthew Arnold, whose “Empedocles on Etna” he recommended to me as containing “all the law and the prophets”.’ Pollard went on to say that Housman’s favourite novelist in his youth was Thomas Hardy, ‘and I think Hardy’s influence went far deeper than Arnold’s’. If so, this was more in mood than anything else, and Housman’s later opinion of Hardy, whom he had come to know socially, was expressed very exactly for publication in 1933: ‘For Hardy I felt affection, and high admiration for some of his novels and a few of his poems.’ More privately, he had told a visitor in 1926 that ‘Hardy has surely accomplished what the other novelists could not have done, but he, as a poet, is only “a mere reflection” of the novelist’s figure.’ In contrast, his admiration for Arnold never wavered. He told the same visitor on a subsequent occasion: ‘To tell the truth, I like Matthew Arnold best. While very few people read Arnold’s poems, a good many people speak of him and pay their respect for him. Those who cannot take Arnold’s humour into consideration are quite out of the question.’ There may be a certain amount of fellow-feeling in this last remark, since Housman’s own humour has sometimes not been taken into consideration when assessing his poetry. A great many echoes of and allusions to Arnold have been detected in Housman’s poetry, notably to ‘Empedocles on Etna’. It seems likely that ‘Dover Beach’ would have appealed to Housman for its evocation of the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the Sea of Faith, while the poem’s opening appears to reverberate in the first lines of A Shropshire Lad’s single coastal poem, ‘The Isle of Portland’ (LIX). Another of Arnold’s poems that might be expected to resonate with Housman, if only for its title, is ‘The Buried Life’. Echoes of this poem have been recorded, though not oddly those in the opening four lines of ‘Look not in my eyes, for fear’ (XV) and the second stanza of ‘From far, from eve and morning’ (XXXII).
Heine is the most unexpected of those writers whose presence is felt in A Shropshire Lad, not least because he stands apart by nationality. Most English people at the time Housman’s volume was published would have known Heine’s poetry largely in a musical context through Schubert and Schumann’s settings, though English translations had been published in America in 1864 and in Britain in 1894. Housman owned a copy of the latter book, Edgar Alfred Bowring’s The Poems of Heine. Complete Translation into the Original Metres with a Sketch of His Life, and probably knew Arnold’s 1865 essay on Heine; but he also owned several volumes of Heine’s work in the original German, including the Buch der Lieder (1889), Neue Gedichte (1876) and an 1885 edition of his collected works. ‘Sinner’s Rue’, published in Last Poems, is so closely based on Heine’s ‘Am Kreuzweg wird begraben’ (Lyrisches Intermezzo LXII) that it amounts to an expanded translation, while one of Housman’s most touching couplets, ‘Homespun collars, homespun hearts, / Wear to rags in foreign parts’ borrows both its sentiment and rhythm from Heine’s lines ‘Deutsche Treue, deutscher Hemde, / Die verschleisst man in der Fremde’. There are echoes of Heine elsewhere among Housman’s poems, but the parallels between the two writers are principally structural and thematic. Both used simple verse forms and wrote poems that could easily be understood by ordinary people. Both were inspired to write poetry by disastrous infatuations in their youth. Both dwelt on the changing seasons, evanescence and death.
As to the two other influences Housman himself acknowledged, echoes of twenty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays have been traced in his poems, as well as allusions to the Sonnets and Venus and Adonis, while the rural setting of A Shropshire Lad and its stories of doomed lovers clearly owe something to the Border Ballads and English folk poetry in general. The Ballads find their most obvious imitation in both the subject matter and ballad form of ‘The True Lover’ (LIII), a grisly colloquy between a self-murdered lad and his girl. This poem, which some commentators have dismissed as in poor taste (chiefly for its rather jocular stanza about the bloody results of a slit throat), would not in fact look out of place in Francis James Child’s seminal The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which was published in five volumes between 1884 and 1898. The rather different colloquies between the failed seducer and the flirtatious maiden in ‘O see how thick the goldcup flowers’ (V) and the dead man and his friend in ‘Is my team ploughing’ (XXVII) also recall these old folk poems. Housman’s rural lovers, soldiers and their sweethearts, murderers, suicides and condemned men are all standard features of traditional ballads. In addition, the four-line stanza rhymed abab in which the majority of the poems in A Shropshire Lad are written is one that was used in many of the Border Ballads.
Echoes of and allusions to works as well known as Gray’s Elegy (or indeed Shakespeare, the Bible and the Border Ballads) serve a more important purpose than the admittedly fascinating academic parlour game of hunting them out. They have the effect of making A Shropshire Lad seem oddly familiar even at first reading and of establishing it almost at once within a literary canon that readers would subliminally recognise, even if they could not identify the actual sources. An example of this is the use made of the song ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, a poem Housman reckoned along with ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ from Twelfth Night as ‘the very summits of lyrical achievement’. The first two lines of the song, ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, / Nor the furious winter’s rages’ are barely recast in ‘The Immortal Part’ (XLIII): ‘Fear the heat o’ the sun no more, / Nor the snowing winter wild’. Housman clearly expected his readers to recognise this borrowing, as well as the fairly obvious echo in ‘With rue my heart is laden’ (LIV), where Shakespeare’s couplet from the same song, ‘Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’ can be heard, both in thought and expression, behind the first stanza. Similarly, one of the reasons that ‘Breath’s a ware that will not keep’ in ‘Reveille’ (IV) is so arresting is that it strikes an echo from the last line of Feste’s song ‘O mistress mine’ in Twelfth Night: ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure’.
As well as skilfully adapting or paraphrasing well-known works of literature, Housman coined his own very memorable images and phrases: ‘an air that kills’, ‘blue remembered hills’, ‘the land of lost content’, ‘shoulder the sky’, ‘blood’s a rover’, ‘the idle hill of summer’, the ‘twelve-winded sky’. As one early reviewer observed: ‘In an extraordinary volume, not the least extraordinary feature is the abounding presence of verbal felicity. Arresting phrases are as numerous as sparrows in ivy at night; but not one of them convinces us it has been manufactured, so easily does each fall into its place, so simple are the means by which the novel effect is procured.’
The combined result of familiar echoes and striking new phrases is that A Shropshire Lad has itself become one of those books from which people quote or recognise poems or stray lines without necessarily being aware of their origin. The experience of two American readers might stand for many: ‘To my knowledge, I’d never intentionally read any A.E. Housman so I was surprised that some of his poems were already familiar to me –“1887” (I) and “When I was one and twenty” (XIII) were both poems I had encountered before, though I couldn’t tell you w
here.’ This brought a response from Colorado: ‘My dad, who died at age 90 last Dec, loved A Shropshire Lad and had a well-worn copy on his bedside table for most of his life. I think Housman is one of those authors that you don’t know that you know until someone attributes well-known lines to him.’ Those who come to know the poems through reading the book tend to find them roosting immovably in the memory. As one of the book’s earliest reviewers put it: ‘You may read it in half-an-hour – but there are things in it you will scarce forget in a lifetime.’
3
Lads in Trouble
Early readers of A Shropshire Lad would have had no background knowledge about the composition of the poems, or about the events that led to such a concentrated period of writing in 1895. Kate Symons suggested that the death of Edward Housman in November 1894 contributed to this lyric outpouring, partly because of ‘the removal of a burden & a distress, for our father had become broken and infirm, though his age was only 63’, but also, and crucially, because it revived ‘the inevitable poignant memories of youth’. Grant Richards believed that although the death of Housman’s father would not have weighed upon him as heavily as that of his mother, ‘it could not have fallen lightly on one who was ever strongly affected by the deaths of those he knew, even if they were not closely connected to him’.