by Peter Parker
Starts in the trefoiled grass,
Halt by the headstone shading
The heart you have not stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.
The promise has been kept because the speaker’s heart is beyond stirring, and his ability to remember has been extinguished by death. As in ‘Oh, when I was in love with you’, the poem is directed by the form and patterns of the verse to a conclusion that is both neat and unexpectedly logical.
Within these bounds, the poem is also a good deal less simple and straightforward than it first appears. For example, the ironic ending is reinforced by the reference to clover, one of the plants whose blooming Housman noted in the pocket diaries in which he also recorded events in Jackson’s life. The entry for 28 June 1889 reads:
Temp. 80
Posted letter to him
Elder fading mostly
Vetch, clover, cheesecake, hemlock, in bloom.
As someone keenly interested in plants, Housman would almost certainly have been aware of the traditions and beliefs surrounding clover. It was once planted on graves because its vitality made it a symbol of resurrection, in addition to which its three leaves were a symbol of the Trinity. (The ‘trefoiled grass’ in the poem refers not to bird’s-foot trefoil, but to clover, for which the botanical Latin name is Trifolium.) Housman also mentions clover growing on a grave in A Shropshire Lad: in ‘Along the field as we came by’ (XXVI) the speaker predicts a time ‘When I shall sleep with clover clad, / And she beside another lad.’ More pertinent to the Jackson poem, however, are clover’s secular associations: it was a symbol of ‘true, yearning love’ in the Middle Ages, and in the language of flowers ‘the White Clover carries a promise (“I shall remain faithful”)’.
Another poem in which two friends, who we can assume are Housman and Jackson, part in that stiff and dry English manner opens:
Shake hands, we shall never be friends; give over:
I only vex you the more I try.
All’s wrong that ever I’ve done or said,
And nought to help it in this dull head:
Shake hands, goodnight, goodbye.
The awkwardness of the scene is beautifully captured in the halting lines, particularly the first, which has an extra foot and disrupts the scansion by reversing the more rhythmic word order of ‘we never shall be friends’. This poem was drafted at the same time as ‘Because I liked you better’, revised in 1895 and then again in 1922, when Housman was preparing Last Poems, only to be discarded once more, presumably for the same reason. Both poems imagine future circumstances in which the friend who has rejected the speaker calls him once more to mind:
But if you come to a road where danger
Or guilt or anguish or shame’s to share,
Be good to the lad who loves you true
And the soul that was born to die for you,
And whistle and I’ll be there.
Roads, usually long and deserted ones along which people make their solitary way, are a frequent feature of Housman’s poetry. This one is more metaphorical than most, but imagines the sort of extreme conditions that might lead the friend to recall the speaker’s existence. Danger is fairly straightforward, but guilt, anguish and shame might well suggest the kind of things to which homosexual men were exposed in the late-Victorian period. ‘Shame’, in particular, was a code word in homosexual writing at this time. In Lord Alfred Douglas’s infamous poem, ‘Two Loves’, for example, two youths appear to the poet in a dream. When asked his name, the pallid youth replies ‘Love’, only to be rebuked by the other youth, who sings of ‘pretty maids’. ‘He lieth, for his name is Shame,’ this second youth declares. The pale youth sighs and replies: ‘Have thy will, / I am the love that dare not speak its name.’ The poem was published in December 1894 – alongside a second poem ‘In Praise of Shame’ – in The Chameleon, an obscure undergraduate magazine, but it reached a wider and appalled public the following April and May when parts of it were read out and discussed during the cross-examination of Oscar Wilde at the Old Bailey. Whether or not Housman was aware of this particular meaning of ‘shame’ is impossible to say, but the attention he appears to have paid to the Wilde trials suggests that he may have been.
The apparently rather maudlin appeal by the true-hearted speaker to treat him well is turned round in the last line of Housman’s poem, in which he offers to come running at any summons to protect his friend, rather as the disembodied speaker in ‘From far, from eve and morning’ (XXXII) blows in to offer his hand and receive confidences. This final line echoes the refrain of a Robert Burns poem of 1793, ‘Oh Whistle, an’ I’ll come to ye, my lad’, and it can hardly be a coincidence that in Burns’s poem a young woman is encouraging a lover while warning him to keep their relationship a secret.
The third, and most successful, poem about the parting from Jackson consists of a mere four lines:
He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways.
The relaxed quality of the first two lines does nothing to prepare us for the desolating terseness of the third line, or the fatalistic resignation of the last one. Readers with some knowledge of the Classics would have recognised the allusion to the story in Plato’s Symposium about the origins of the human race, in which creatures split in two by Zeus spent their lives searching for their lost ‘other half’. If humans were lucky enough to find this missing half, they would form indissoluble bonds and be extremely happy. Housman’s poem suggests that the speaker, having imagined that he had found that lost portion, is now condemned to go out into the world again permanently maimed.
Equally moving are three short poems derived from Sappho that Housman wrote about Jackson. The first of these to be published was the last to be written, in 1922 while Housman was assembling Last Poems, where it appeared as no. XXVI. As he admitted, Housman took this Ancient Greek fragment and turned it into an English ballad, both in its structure and its language.
The half-moon westers low, my love,
And the wind brings up the rain;
And wide apart we lie, my love,
And seas between us twain.
I know not if it rains, my love,
In the land where you do lie;
And oh, how sound you sleep, my love,
You know no more than I.
The lovers are in different lands, but there is a suggestion here, not apparent in the other versions, that they are tenuously bound together because neither knows whether or not it is raining in the far country – but this is only because the distant lover is sleeping soundly rather than lying awake like the speaker. The ballad-like form of the poem, with its repetition of the tag ‘my love’ at the end of every other line, will lead most readers to imagine it concerns a man and a woman. This is the version Housman chose to publish; but the earlier versions are more direct and more powerful. In both of them the speaker is alone, thinking of a lover in a distant land, as Housman may have lain awake thinking of Jackson, who was in India at the time the poems were written. ‘The weeping Pleiads wester’ is the more obviously mournful, with its repeat of ‘weeping’ and ‘sighs’; but it is the other poem that, in its hard-won restraint and its acknowledgement of unequal affections, is the more moving:
The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases,
And I lie down alone.
The rainy Pleiads wester
And seek beyond the sea
The head that I will dream of,
And ’twill not dream of me.
This poem is related to Jackson by the fact that the ‘Epithalamium’ Housman wrote for him was drafted on its verso, by the shared source of Sappho, and by the sense of friends or lovers separated by geography.
The tension between expresse
d and unexpressed feelings in many of the poems is also apparent in the correspondence between Housman and Jackson that has so far been published. These letters display the awkwardness arising from a disparity of feeling that Housman uses to such effect in the poems. Housman sent Jackson a copy of Last Poems on the day it was published, with a long and jocularly boastful letter in which the combination of his natural modesty and the urge to impress his friend makes for uneasy reading. The joke Housman made in respect of the proposed Braille edition of the book gets its first airing here. ‘The cheerful and exhilarating tone of my verse is so notorious that I feel sure it will do you more good than the doctors,’ he wrote; but he goes on to add a second reason for sending Jackson the poems: ‘you do not know, and there are no means of driving the knowledge into your thick head, what a bloody good poet I am’. Housman nevertheless has a very good go at convincing Jackson by sending evidence of the esteem in which he is held. ‘In order to intimidate you and repress your insolence,’ he continues, ‘I am enclosing the review and the leader which the Times devoted to the subject.’ He went on to tell Jackson that the first edition of A Shropshire Lad he had sent him was ‘now worth £8 or more if you have kept it at all clean’, and that the average annual sale of the book was now over 3000. Of the new book he wrote: ‘It is now 11 o’clock in the morning, and I hear that the Cambridge shops are all sold out.’ He concluded this catalogue by writing, in one of those instances when sharp teasing and painful sincerity warred for supremacy: ‘Please to realise therefore, with fear and respect, that I am an eminent bloke; though I would much rather have followed you round the world and blacked your boots.’ He then swiftly passed on to more general news from England, and ended the letter on a curiously formal note: ‘My very kind regards to Mrs Jackson.’
Jackson had gone into hospital a few days after receiving this letter and did not have it to hand when he replied from his bed there. He declined to take seriously what he called, with some justification, Housman’s ‘extraordinary exhibition about blacking boots!’ ‘My most presentable boots are brown,’ he wrote, ‘requiring no blacking, Larry old chap. At home I wear boots of canvas & rubber composition, known as snagproof, as your choice is for an absolute sinecure.’* Jackson may have lived abroad for thirty-three years, but he was still very much a product of his English era and upbringing, able to deflect any potentially embarrassing displays of feeling by turning them into a joke. It may be that this response provoked Housman to declare more directly in the letter already quoted that he was ‘a fellow who thinks more of you than anything in the world’. This declaration too was hedged about with jokey insults about the ‘natural disagreeableness’ of Jackson’s character, though it might be said that Housman’s devotion was made all the more forceful since it was expressed in counterpoint to, and in spite of, Jackson’s supposed failings.
These letters not only provide poignant evidence of the gulf between Housman’s feeling for Jackson and Jackson’s for Housman; they also painfully acknowledge and exemplify what Housman in ‘If truth in hearts that perish’ (XXXIII) had called ‘This long and sure-set liking, / This boundless will to please’. He may well have had that poem in mind when he wrote these letters to his seriously ill friend, since it continues: ‘– Oh, you should live for ever / If there were help in these.’ In January 1923, over a quarter of a century after he wrote these lines, Housman sent a letter to Pollard giving news of Jackson’s death at the age of sixty-four. With a lapidary poignancy characteristic of his best poems, he declared: ‘Now I can die myself: I could not have borne to leave him behind me in a world where anything might happen to him.’ He would in fact live for another thirteen years.
5
Last Poems, Last Years
A Shropshire Lad had become so popular during the First World War that in the summer of 1918 Richards proposed a new edition of 5000 copies, even though the cover price would have to be increased to 1s 6d ‘owing to the cost of labour and material’. On being informed of this, Housman (referring to increased wages on the home front) replied: ‘The working classes at any rate can well afford 1/6, though I don’t know if 5000 will want to.’ In the event the book sold over three times that number of copies during the last year of the war. Perhaps encouraged by these sales, Housman took a rather more sanguine view of the prospects of his keenly anticipated second volume of poems and suggested a first print run of 10,000 copies. Richards, having consulted booksellers, decided to print only 4000 copies, which he judged enough ‘to make as certain as I could that everyone who was sufficiently intelligent could get a copy on the day of publication’.
The publication of Last Poems on 19 October 1922 turned out to be a major literary event, attracting widespread coverage in the press. As Housman had boasted, the book was not merely reviewed in The Times, but in the same issue became the subject of an editorial headed ‘Ave Atque Vale’, acknowledging Housman’s declared intention in the volume’s prefatory note that these would indeed be the last poems he would publish. The following week, a cartoon by Bert Thomas appeared in Punch, depicting an uncharacteristically jolly Housman, dressed in a ploughman’s smock and hob-nailed boots and piping on a flute, dancing his way into the Temple of the Muse, where he is greeted by a laurel-wreathed figure exclaiming: ‘Oh, Alfred, we have missed you! My lad! My Shropshire Lad!’ The reading public had certainly missed Housman and Richards’s caution proved unnecessary: not only was the book already reprinting on the day of publication, but by the end of the year, a mere ten weeks later, Richards had been obliged to print a further 17,000 copies.
As The Times had, most critics took Housman at his word (while hoping that they might be wrong), and so used reviews to pronounce judgement on what they now considered his complete oeuvre of just over 100 poems. Last Poems was generally and rightly regarded as all of a piece with A Shropshire Lad. The Times called the new book ‘a continuation’ of the earlier one, while J.C. Squire in his London Mercury described the poems as ‘“extra numbers” to the Shropshire Lad, as good as the old’. The TLS review appeared under the headline ‘The “Shropshire Lad” again’, and as a contented Edmund Gosse observed: ‘We wanted, not another Shropshire Lad, but more of the old one, and that is what we have got.’ Gosse was among several critics who felt that if anything these new poems were technically even better than those in the first volume. Looking back, he suggested that there were ‘one or two’ poems in A Shropshire Lad in which ‘the tune wavered on the instrument’: ‘In the new volume, I cannot discover any fault of this kind, the mastery of technique having become complete, the music impeccable.’ ‘In almost each of the forty-one poems in this book,’ wrote Amabel Clough-Ellis in the Spectator, Housman ‘has achieved that complete fusion of rhythm, sound and sense which characterise a perfect work of art’, while the Bookman described Last Poems as ‘a collection of lyrics so singular and exquisite that almost the only adequate way to recommend them to readers would be to quote shamelessly from every page’.
Housman had this time made proper arrangements to have his book published in the United States, by Henry Holt & Co., which had that same year published the ‘Authorised Edition’ of A Shropshire Lad. The book appeared in November and received reviews equal in their enthusiasm to those in England. Lee Wilson Dodd in the Literary Review suggested that the poet could now be referred to simply as ‘Housman’, ‘for he belongs to the immortals’. He commended Housman’s small output, particularly when compared with the productivity of other well-known writers: ‘Mr [H.G.] Wells, for example, has written a library, while Housman has composed a few lines of verse. Yet it is probable that a hundred or so words by Housman will be remembered, treasured (though never by many), long after the million or so words by Mr Wells have been forgotten.’ The suggestion that Housman appealed only to the discerning few was at odds with what Amabel Clough-Ellis had claimed. For her, Housman was ‘that rare being, a poet with a public. Indeed, his one chance of being misjudged may be that he is too popular.’ Clearly, even Housman’s s
ales could not match those of America’s most popular poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, whose Poems of Passion (1883) sold 60,000 copies in two years. The widespread pirating of A Shropshire Lad in America nevertheless suggested that publishers at any rate thought that Housman would be treasured by the many. The result of Housman’s disinclination to prevent pirated editions, wrote the American collector Carl J. Weber, was ‘a large number of American printings, and the creation of an immense audience for Housman’.
Furthermore, since Housman took no steps to prevent it, as he did in England, his poems reached a new audience when they were widely anthologised in America. When Weber donated his entire collection of Housman material to the Colby College Library in Maine in 1946, he also ‘examined twenty-five American anthologies covering the poetry of Housman’s period, in the thought that editorial selections among the Shropshire [Lad] poems might give some indication of their popularity with American readers.’ He found that ‘Reveille’ had appeared in eighteen of the twenty-five anthologies, ‘With rue my heart is laden’ in sixteen, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ and ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’ in thirteen, ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ in eleven, ‘Is my team ploughing’ and ‘Think no more, lad; laugh, be jolly’ in nine, and ‘Bredon Hill’ in seven. Well over a third of the poems had been anthologised, in addition to which thirteen of them had been published by Housman’s fervent American admirer Witter Bynner in McClure’s Magazine, of which he was poetry editor and which at the time had a ‘huge and important circulation’.
As in England, literary young men claimed to have many of the poems by heart. ‘When I was a student at Yale, I read and memorised considerable portions of A Shropshire Lad,’ recalled Stephen Vincent Benét. Carl Van Doren similarly claimed that ‘Most of the Shropshire lyrics […] I knew by heart.’ The fact that Last Poems appeared in America at the same time, and from the same publisher, as the authorised edition of A Shropshire Lad helped consolidate Housman’s reputation there. Neilson Abeel, editor of Princeton’s Nassau Literary Review (founded 1842), wrote that to him and his classmates of 1922 ‘Housman came as a discovery. Soon we knew all the poems of A Shropshire Lad, and quotations from them became part of our everyday speech.’ The British writer Beverley Nichols recalled meeting a manufacturer of suspenders in Providence, Rhode Island, who produced from his pocket a first edition of A Shropshire Lad, the poems of which he knew by heart and proceeded to declaim. ‘I have seldom heard poetry recited so beautifully,’ Nichols reported.