by Peter Parker
He may keep that will and can;
Not I …
It continues in this vein, with the poet pouring scorn on those who would seek to interfere in his life:
let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
In its final lines the poem shifts in tone from cold anger to vulnerability and defeat:
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger, and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
The alternative to doing so would be all too vividly demonstrated by the fates of Wilde and Maclean.
It is perhaps hard to imagine Housman ‘afraid’ of anything, but he may well have been speaking here in the voice of the Shropshire Lad, who in the second stanza of ‘Others, I am not the first’ (XXX) imagines that:
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.
Fear contending with desire was a very familiar sensation for homosexual men of the period, and it was almost certainly poems such as these that prompted readers such as Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson to write to Housman. Dickinson was a close friend of E.M. Forster and the author of such books as The Greek View of Life, which was published the same year as A Shropshire Lad and earned Housman’s admiration. Of Last Poems, he told Housman that ‘what they say appeals to something very deep in me. And deep calls to deep. It does not follow that surface calls to surface and I am not trying to intrude myself. I wanted to say just this and leave it there.’
That God has much to answer for is evident in another invigoratingly bad-tempered poem in the same volume, in which Housman challenges ‘Whatever brute or blackguard made the world’. The poem is ostensibly about that very English subject the weather. It is Maytime, that traditionally hopeful season in which troubles seem often to arrive or weigh heavily upon the poet.
The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there’s an end to May.
Cursing English weather is a popular national pastime, but this is no mere case of rain stopping play, preventing the Lad from striding out onto a cricket pitch, ‘trying to be glad’. Whereas the cycle of nature is responsible for the evanescence of cherry blossom in the second poem of A Shropshire Lad, the flowers here have been stripped from trees before their time, and the Creator is accused of having arranged this out of sheer spite:
There’s one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.
The sheer pettiness of the deity – this ‘iniquity on high’ – is contrasted with the nobility of humans, who in the final stanza have no alternative but to bear stoically ‘The troubles of our proud and angry dust’, and ‘shoulder the sky’ – as, in better, classical times (the Golden Age, indeed), deities did on mankind’s behalf. Those who accuse Housman of merely moping should be directed to these poems in which his anger is thrillingly unleashed.
In A Shropshire Lad, however, Housman wrote about the wrongs suffered by young men more in sorrow than in anger. These wrongs may be universal, but for some readers they seemed specific. If we can now hear clearly the faint note of suppressed homosexual desire that sounds like a muffled drumbeat throughout the book, it is partly because we know the biographical background to the poems, know what led Housman to write them, know that Moses Jackson was their buried mainspring. Even so, while early readers without access to this information such as Richard Le Gallienne seem surprisingly deaf to those beats, others who were more attuned heard them at the time. These were the ‘few young men here and there’ for whom Housman said he wrote the poems. Housman also referred to these young men in a poem he drafted at some time between 1895 and 1900. Although he had revised the poem in the spring of 1922 when he was assembling Last Poems, there is no evidence he planned to use it to preface that or any other volume. It nevertheless became his apologia when printed by Laurence Housman as the epigraph to More Poems, and contains a dedication in the second of its two stanzas:
This is for all ill-treated fellows
Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they’re in trouble
And I am not.
One of the possible reasons Housman never published the poem during his lifetime is that it had to some extent been made redundant by the final poem in A Shropshire Lad, which he had used in the same way (as an envoi rather than, in Laurence’s design, as an epigraph) to say much the same thing. Certain readers of that poem would know precisely what Housman meant when he described them as ‘luckless lads’ and ‘lads like me’, just as they would be able to identify the ways in which they had been ‘ill-treated’ and ‘in trouble’ in the verses prefacing More Poems. Geoffrey Wethered had written to Laurence Housman in 1937, presumably explaining in his letter (now lost) what it was about Housman’s poems that had particularly moved him. Laurence replied: ‘It always pleases me to know that his work had a special appeal to the young. When the appeal is very special, I guess the reason, and am glad that the note of sympathy with trouble got through to them.’
It is no coincidence that Housman himself should refer in a letter to ‘the great and real troubles of my early manhood’, by which he meant those that gave rise to the poems of A Shropshire Lad. ‘Trouble’ and its variants (‘troubles’, ‘troubled’) is another of those words that frequently recur in his poetry, mostly as a catch-all, perhaps, but – as the letter just quoted suggests – also with a more specific meaning. It is unclear in ‘In valleys of springs of rivers’ (L) what kind of difficulties the lads who ‘knew trouble at Knighton’ were experiencing, except that there is a suggestion that it was not the kind of trouble that assails people only when they are young: it was a lifelong burden, to be laid down only at death. Similarly, the ‘troubles’ that afflict the Roman patrolling Wenlock Edge, and have been inherited by the poem’s speaker, are relieved only when they and the centurion are ‘ashes under Uricon’. Prophylaxis against troubles in ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’ is similarly recommended in ‘I to my perils of cheat and charmer’, published in More Poems, in which the poet comes to maturity ‘clad in armour’:
The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting,
Of luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.
That this trouble is related to those of Housman’s early manhood is reinforced by another poem in the volume in which the speaker, as elsewhere, resigns himself to the indifference of other people and the natural world to his sufferings:
The world goes none the lamer,
For aught that I can see,
Because this cursed trouble
Has struck my days and me.
The suicidal impulse in early manhood, and the unstated troubles that give rise to it, also surface in the Heine-inspired ‘Sinner’s Rue’. Here the poet picks the blue ‘weed of sorrow’ he finds growing at a crossroads, which is where those who killed themselves were traditionally buried. Heine calls this blue flower die Armesünderblum, which literally
translates as ‘the poor sinner’s flower’: ‘sinner’s rue’ appears to be Housman’s own coinage, and not a term otherwise recorded for wild chicory (Cichorium intybus).
It seems a herb of healing,
A balsam and a sign,
Flower of a heart whose trouble
Must have been worse than mine.
Is the sin that gives the flower its name that of suicide, or is the flower emblematic of some other, unnamed and perhaps unnameable, trouble? The speaker goes on his way determined to continue with his life rather than put an end to it – and he wears the flower on his breast, just as the luckless lads in the final poem of A Shropshire Lad will wear the flowers the poet has spent so much time and energy cultivating. If these flowers are not the green carnations Oscar Wilde encouraged young men to sport at the first performance of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892 (and which are too much the product of artifice to grow in Housman Country), then they certainly have a similar emblematic significance.
A Shropshire Lad contains a number of poems that might not strike the average reader as anything out of the ordinary, but would be eagerly and gratefully seized upon by ‘luckless lads’. Housman was much amused when the financial expert called in to oversee the restructuring of Richards’s publishing house in 1929 described A Shropshire Lad as the ‘filthiest book I have ever read: all about rogering girls under hedges’. One would be hard pressed to cite any instances of actual rogering in the poems, but many of them describe the kinds of thwarted romances between country lads and lasses that are often found in folk poetry. Other poems, however, describe relationships in which the gender of the beloved remains at best ambiguous. Alongside the hearty companionship of ‘true fellows’ who are in every sense ‘clean’ and ‘straight’, and whose ‘heartstrings’ are knitted ‘right’, are friendships characterised by a yearning uncertainty. The glance exchanged between the redcoat and the onlooker in ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’ (XXII) is no more than that, though charged with an erotic possibility that fizzles out almost as soon as it is ignited, leaving the speaker merely to murmur in the final valedictory line ‘Soldier, I wish you well’.
Elsewhere, the look is more lingering:
Look not in my eyes, for fear
They mirror true the sight I see,
And there you find your face too clear
And love it and be lost like me.
The conceit is worthy of Donne or other Metaphysical poets, a school which Housman dismissed in ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’ as ‘intellectually frivolous’. These four lines are an example of the creative tension mentioned earlier between revelation and concealment, between saying too little and saying too much. A glance gives little time in which to gauge its nature, but a look that is held can be revealing in all kinds of ways. The speaker here, while ostensibly wanting to protect the beloved, is also concerned to protect himself. There is a nod to the traditional notion that the eyes are the mirror of the soul, for the look in the speaker’s eyes will ‘mirror true’ and betray feelings which will indeed become all ‘too clear’. In addition the speaker cannot but give himself away when he speaks out: the beloved will see his own image in the speaker’s eyes ‘And love it and be lost like me’.
The only ambiguity here is that the beloved could, at a stretch, be a woman, but the mirror imagery of the poem would not really work if the two lovers were of a different gender; in addition to which, the poem’s second stanza evokes the figure of the ‘Grecian lad’ Narcissus. There are several versions of the Narcissus legend, but perhaps the best known is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the beautiful youth is loved by the nymph Echo. When he rejects her, he is punished by being made to fall in love instead with his own reflection in a pool. In other versions, Narcissus has male suitors who are similarly repulsed, but most accounts of the legend end with Narcissus trapped by this amour de l’impossible and drowning – either accidentally, in an attempt to embrace his own reflection, or deliberately, because he realises that his love is a hopeless mirage. Narcissus had become a popular figure in homosexual literature, partly because of his rejection of Echo for the beautiful youth he finds in the pool (something of a distortion of Ovid’s narrative), but also because his story provided a covert way to write about one beautiful youth falling in love with another. The usual suspects line up: the title poem of Edward Carpenter’s first volume of poetry, Narcissus and Other Poems (1873), is a long, not to say in parts lingering, account of the Greek lad and his ‘dream-fed beauty’; André Gide devoted a ten-page pamphlet to the myth, Le Traité du Narcisse (1871); Oscar Wilde compares Dorian Gray to Narcissus, and retells the myth from the pool’s point of view in ‘The Disciple’, one of his Poems in Prose; while a number of lesser authors wrote poems in which the myth was retold or used as a reference point. In S.S. Saale’s ‘Sonnet’, for instance, a group of grimy urchins sitting on a wall undergo a classical metamorphosis when they ‘strip and plunge into the stream below’:
Like fragrant ashes from a classic urn,
Flashed into life anew once more we see
Narcissus by the pool …
Housman’s poem is far more subtle than this kind of thing, although it is possible that he had read Wilde’s ‘The Disciple’, first published in the Fortnightly Review in July 1894. Wilde’s prose poem ends with the pool speaking and employing a similar image to the one Housman uses in his poem: ‘But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.’
Another poem in A Shropshire Lad that appears to be as deeply felt as ‘Look not in my eyes, for fear’ is XXXIII, which opens:
If truth in hearts that perish
Could move the powers on high,
I think the love I bear you
Should make you not to die.
These lines echo ‘When the lad for longing sighs’ (VI), in which a ‘Maiden’ is told that she ‘can heal his ail’; in this case, however, it is the speaker whose love, were it accepted, would make his friend immortal – as indeed being the subject of the poem will give him literary immortality. The friend, however, is inclined to reject the speaker’s ‘long and sure-set liking’, and the poem ends in resignation.
Homosexual readers would also have been alert to the gentle irony of ‘The Merry Guide’ (XLII), in which the poet encounters an attractive young man clad in little but a feathered cap and winged sandals:
With gay regards of promise
And sure unslackened stride
And smiles and nothing spoken
Led on my merry guide.
Like most such young men, this one spells trouble. The teasingly seductive youth refuses to answer the poet’s questions about their destination, or even speak at all, merely laughing and beckoning as he lures him to the realm of the dead.
Another classical encounter (LI) is the one that takes place among the antiquities of the British Museum, where the sixteen-year-old Housman decided he preferred the Farnese Mercury (the Merry Guide himself) to the Townley Venus. The Grecian lad the poet finds here is made of marble, but similarly exiled to London from the land of his birth. ‘I too survey that endless line / Of men whose thoughts are not as mine,’ the poet imagines the statue telling him – thoughts that perhaps cannot be admitted in London, though they may have been acceptable in the land of lost content that was Ancient Greece.
It did not take too much reading between the lines of some of the poems to realise what Housman was saying, and although most public comments about the nature of such poems were either discreet or obtuse, certain people were not prepared to play ball. In his 1932 revue Words and Music Noël Coward introduced his wickedly knowing song ‘Mad About the Boy’, in which three female characters bemoan the fact that they are unrequitedly in love with a film star. ‘I know that quite sincerely / Housman really / Wrote The Shropshire Lad about the boy,’ the schoolgirl declares. Coward had both spotted and cheekily exposed the ‘secret’ behind the book. Whether H
ousman ever heard this song is not known, and he might have been appalled as much by the fact that the title of his book was rendered incorrectly as he would have been by its flagrant indiscretion.
Writing about the homosexual undercurrents in the literature of the First World War, the American critic Paul Fussell asked: ‘Do the British have a special talent for such passions? An enquirer turning over the names of late nineteenth and early twentieth century literary worthies might be led to think so as he encounters Wilde, Samuel Butler, Edward Fitzgerald, Housman, Hopkins, Symonds, Strachey, Edward Marsh, William Johnson Cory (author of the ‘Eton Boating Song’), Hugh Walpole, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and J.R. Ackerley.’
One could point Fussell to other countries that had a similar homosexual literary tradition, but not perhaps one that flourished in full view as well as having an underground currency. For every volume of privately printed ‘Uranian’ verse there were many more mainstream volumes that celebrated ‘romantic friendships’ and the beauty of boys and men. From the public-school novels of the late-Victorian and Edwardian era to the poetry and memoirs that emerged from the trenches, this literature was read and enjoyed by people who would not have thought of it as ‘homosexual’. Most readers would have felt the same about A Shropshire Lad; but others were grateful to read a book that appeared to allude to their own particular, and more often than not secret and repressed, romantic longings. It is no surprise that Oscar Wilde’s friend and champion Robbie Ross learned parts of A Shropshire Lad by heart so that he could recite them to the playwright while he was in prison. Housman sent Wilde a copy of his poems when the playwright was released in May 1897, and in July Wilde embarked upon his long poem ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, which he completed that October. ‘I have lately been reading your brother’s lovely lyrical poems,’ Wilde wrote to Laurence Housman in August, and traces of those poems are discernible in his ballad about a redcoat who is hanged for cutting his wife’s throat.