Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Breaking his usual rule, Housman gave Raleigh permission to reprint six poems from A Shropshire Lad as a Broadsheet (no. 38). Quite what Lancastrian rankers would have made of the selected poems – ‘Reveille’, ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’, ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’, ‘On the idle hill of summer’, ‘The isle of Portland’ and ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’ – is anyone’s guess. However, whether as a result of the widespread distribution of these poems or simply because Housman’s work spoke to a nation at war, yearly sales of A Shropshire Lad surpassed even those of the pre-war period, reaching 14,000 in 1916 and 16,000 in 1918.

  Lads, We’ll Remember Friends of Ours

  Several of the war poets had, like Patrick Shaw-Stewart, been among those who carried the book with them to the front. Sassoon’s copy was a pocket edition published in 1912 and is inscribed ‘Siegfried Sassoon / 1st R.W. Fus. Nov. 1915 / 2nd R.W. Fus. March 1917 / 25th R.W. Fus. March 1918’. In other words, the book had accompanied him throughout his war service, both on the Western Front and in the Middle East. Wilfred Owen, who was himself a Shropshire lad, born near Oswestry and brought up in Shrewsbury, purchased his copy from Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in November 1915, shortly after he had enlisted and still feeling a little self-conscious in his brand new uniform. Gurney’s copies have already been mentioned, and we can assume that one of the pockets mentioned by Robert Nichols was his own.

  Even those soldier-poets who are not known to have tucked the book into their uniforms were undoubtedly influenced by A Shropshire Lad in what they wrote. Edward Thomas had tramped across enough of England before the war to look beyond an imaginary Shropshire, but Housman is nevertheless discernible in such wartime poems as ‘A Private’, ‘In Memoriam (Easter 1915)’ and ‘The Cherry Trees’. The last, written in May 1916, inevitably brings to mind ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, and its reference to ‘the old road where all that passed are dead’ is distinctly Housman-like. ‘A Private’, written in January 1915, describes a soldier-ploughman who in death ‘sleeps’ out of doors in a place no one can find, just as he did in life. Exchanging a protecting hawthorn bush on the Wiltshire Downs for his bed of clay on the battlefields of France, ‘he sleeps / More sound’, just as Housman’s dead lads do. Housman is most obviously present, both in form and content, in ‘In Memoriam (Easter 1915)’, a single compressed stanza of four lines in which unpicked flowers in a wood at ‘Eastertide’ remind the poet of the war’s dead, who are no longer there to join their sweethearts in gathering the blooms. This is the traditional springtime recreation that Housman described in such poems as ‘Oh see how thick the goldcup flowers’, ‘March’, ‘The Lent Lily’ and, most particularly, ‘’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town’, where the speaker, detained by exile rather than death, is no longer able to join the assembled couples.

  More generally, both the irony and the plangency that are characteristic of Housman’s poetry suited the mood of those writing about the war. The gap between the high ideals with which many young men enlisted and the experiences they and their fellow soldiers underwent in the trenches produced a mood of disillusionment. There were, of course, others whose idealism and belief in the justice of the war survived even the most ghastly front-line experiences, and it is notable that Sassoon, having made a public protest against the war that almost got him court-martialled, went back to lead his men into battle. As Housman had demonstrated, irony was a way – and a very English way – of assimilating and recording unpalatable daily reality, and it became the dominant mode of much of the writing about the First World War. If ‘On the idle hill of summer’ captures the kind of romantic enthusiasm for soldiering that caused young men to volunteer for service as soon as war was declared in 1914, then other poems on non-military themes show a way of responding to the implacable workings of fate.

  Like Rupert Brooke, Charles Hamilton Sorley had drawn the attention of his schoolfellows to A Shropshire Lad, in a talk he gave to the Marlborough College Literary Society in May 1913, a few days shy of his eighteenth birthday. He judged that ‘as a language-maker alone, apart from what he expresses, [Housman] is second to none of his contemporaries and can sit beside almost any other English poet, except Shakespeare’. ‘1887’ and ‘On the idle hill of summer’ were, he felt, ‘as fine as anything I know’, and although he saw Shropshire as the wellspring of Housman’s poetry, he added: ‘I do not know much about the Greeks: perhaps something less than I ought to: but it has struck me that Housman would have pleased them very much. His perfect restraint and refinement of obloquy or irony: no less than his limited and reasonable conclusions about the universe: would have charmed many lesser Greek philosophers with the charm that it produced by reflecting “That’s exactly what I think too: and if I had had to express it, I should have expressed it in exactly the same way.”’

  In its rhymes, rhythms, vocabulary and equivocal tone, Sorley’s best-known poem, ‘All the hills and vales along’, follows Housman’s lead:

  All the hills and vales along

  Earth is bursting into song,

  And the singers are the chaps

  Who are going to die perhaps.

  Frequently anthologised (sometimes under the unauthorised title ‘Marching Song’ and in one anthology of war poetry in a section titled ‘Visions of Glory’), this poem has more in common with Housman’s ‘On the idle hill of summer’ than it does with Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’. The countryside through which the soldiers march merely sends back a hollow echo of their song and is wholly indifferent to their fate, just as nature tends to be in Housman:

  Earth that never doubts nor fears,

  Earth that knows of death, not tears,

  Earth that bore with joyful ease

  Hemlock for Socrates,

  Earth that blossomed and was glad

  ’Neath the cross that Christ had,

  Shall rejoice and blossom too

  When the bullet reaches you.

  Wherefore, men marching

  On the road to death, sing!

  Pour your gladness on earth’s head,

  So be merry, so be dead.

  That final line, as with the ‘perhaps’ at the end of the first extract, combined with what we know about Sorley’s attitude to the war from his remarkable letters, suggests that to class this poem as an unequivocal celebration of the warrior spirit would be misguided. Like Housman’s soldiers, Sorley’s are ‘marching, all to die’.

  A less well-known poet, Frank Prewett, was Canadian, but was educated at Christ Church, Oxford and served with the Royal Field Artillery in France until he was wounded in 1917. It was while convalescing in London that he met Sassoon and the two men became close friends, though Sassoon’s physical attraction to Prewett was not reciprocated. ‘The Soldier’, published in his 1921 volume of Poems, suggests that Prewett knew his Housman. (Having returned to Ontario after the war, he would complain: ‘Thomas Hardy cannot be bought in Toronto, nor The Shropshire Lad’.) The first verse more or less recapitulates ‘Is my team ploughing’, even down to the rhyming of ‘plough’ and ‘now’:

  My years I counted twenty-one

  Mostly at the tail of plough:

  The furrow that I drove is done,

  To sleep in furrow now.

  The third verse, though containing a sexual image wholly alien to Housman, also sounds familiar:

  A lad to life has paid his debts

  Who bests and kills a foe,

  A man upon his sweetheart gets

  To reap as well as sow.

  Though he later had a more complicated literary relationship with Housman, whom he thought unreliable because homosexual (with the proviso that ‘this was “all right” because he’d hated being one’), Robert Graves seems to have known A Shropshire Lad when he went off to war. His second volume of poems, Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), contains some distinct Housman echoes, as in the couplet ‘Rhyme and music flow in plenty / For the lad of one-and-twenty’ in ‘Babylon’
and the line ‘Shot, poor lad, so bold and young’ in ‘When I’m Killed’. Similarly, the first stanza of ‘To Lucasta on Going to the War – for the Fourth Time’, in which the Fusiliers are self-described as ‘lads’ who are both proud and true, owes as much to Housman as it does to Lovelace, while ‘An Old Twenty-Third Man’, ostensibly about a Roman legion but clearly with application to the present war, both refers to ‘brave lads that die’ and more generally cries kinship with ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’.

  Then as now, soldiers were often referred to collectively as ‘lads’ by their comrades and in the popular press, with no intended nod to Housman. Paul Fussell has nevertheless argued that ‘Housman’s greatest contribution to the war was the word lad, to which his poems had given the meaning “a beautiful brave doomed boy”.’ He goes on to suggest: ‘In Great War diction there are three degrees of erotic heat attaching to three words: men is largely neutral; boys is a little warmer; lads is very warm […] As men grow more attractive, they are seen as boys, until finally, when they are conceived as potential lovers, they turn into lads […] The lads who populate the poems and memoirs of the Great War have about them both the doom of Housman’s lads and the pederastic allure of John Gambrill Nicholson’s.’

  Nicholson (1866–1931) was one of the self-styled Uranian poets who had, in their own subterranean way, flourished from the late 1880s, publishing enough volumes of verse celebrating boyhood to fill an entire prep-school library. Most of these books were ‘Privately Printed’ and recklessly frank about their authors’ appreciation of the finer points of ‘boys’ and ‘lads’ both ancient and modern, from diminutive Greek gods, through anguished juvenile saints, to bold modern striplings in (or sometimes out of) hotel-page or telegraph-office uniforms. The Uranians were extremely fond of the word ‘lad’, perhaps because its very ambiguity cast a gossamer veil of decency over their verses. ‘Lad’ had more of a stretch in terms of age than ‘boy’, extending beyond childhood and adolescence to encompass young men of the sort Housman wrote about. It all, however, depended on context: the Church Lads’ Brigade, for example, seems straightforwardly above board; a volume of poems titled Ladslove Lyrics (1918) by ‘Philebus’ less so.*

  Although Housman had no association with these poets, and would have regarded both their prosody and their approach to their subject matter as incontinent, A Shropshire Lad was included in F.E. Murray’s A Catalogue of Selected Books from the Private Library of a Student of Boyhood, Youth and Comradeship (1924), where it keeps company with such titles as the Rev. E.E. Bradford’s Passing the Love of Women (1913), Cuthbert Wright’s One Way of Love (1915) and A Boy’s Absence ‘By a Schoolmaster’ (1919). ‘Look not in my eyes, for fear’ (XV), with its final lines about the ‘Grecian lad’ Narcissus turning into a downward-glancing ‘jonquil’, and ‘The Merry Guide’ (XLII), in which the poet is beguiled by the figure of a youthful Mercury, are the only poems in A Shropshire Lad that might fit the canon of Uranian verse, but both of them are far more subtle and austerely chaste than most of the literary effusions of the movement’s clergymen and schoolmasters. Given that the circulation of Uranian books was a great deal less widespread than that of A Shropshire Lad, Fussell is right to attribute the flowering of ‘lad’ in First World War poetry to Housman rather than to these poetic pederasts, although there is occasionally some overlap.*

  The very close bonds that developed between soldiers at the front have often been written about, and the love and loss recorded in war poetry tends more often to be about comrades killed in the trenches than girls left behind at home. It was as if Housman’s laments for doomed lads, ‘handsome of face and […] handsome of heart’, not only showed a younger generation of poets how to write elegies for dead friends that sometimes read like love poetry, but also gave them permission to do so. Gurney, for example, unselfconsciously gave the title ‘To His Love’ to the poem he wrote about Will Harvey. It is a poem in which landscape, love and loss are all bound up in a way that would be wholly familiar to readers of A Shropshire Lad. Part of the reason Housman was a useful model for such elegies is that he avoided the archness and furtiveness of the Decadents and Uranians that – particularly in the wake of the Wilde trials – made much of the poetry written about young men seem highly suspect, choosing instead a style that was classically restrained but none the less affecting for that. ‘The one [poet] who most moves me to tears – when poetry can – is Housman,’ wrote Robert Lowell. ‘His iron quatrains are sometimes like the tomb-inscriptions for the Athenian youths who died at Marathon’ – and it was both Housman and his classical predecessors who provided models for poetry mourning the English youths who died at Loos, in the Ypres Salient and on the Somme.

  The notion Housman proposed in such poems as ‘1887’ and ‘The Recruit’ that the best a soldier could hope for, given that he was likely to die in battle, was to be remembered by his friends was realised in countless poetic tributes written by soldiers to dead young comrades. Second Lieutenant H. Rex Freston, whose parents were living in the Shropshire village of Worthen when he was killed in action in January 1916, was the author of two volumes of poetry. The Quest of Truth, published posthumously in 1916, contained two poems titled ‘To A.M. (Killed in Flanders)’, one of which clearly takes Housman as its model:

  Time was in summer weather,

  By Cherwell’s wandering streams,

  We loved to walk together

  To where the iris gleams.

  Now in French fields are blowing

  Wild flowers about your hair;

  And gentle streams are flowing

  But you no longer care.

  It is not simply that the form of the poem recalls Housman: the walk through the countryside, the summer weather, the wandering streams, the contrast between past happiness and the forlorn present, of love interrupted by death and of the inevitable though unwilled indifference of the dead friend or lover, are all familiar from such poems as ‘Bredon Hill’, ‘This time of year a twelvemonth past’, ‘Along the field as we came by’, ‘When last I came to Ludlow’ and ‘With rue my heart is laden’. Another of Freston’s poems, ‘The Garden of Death’, seems to borrow its first line from this last poem: ‘Now the golden lads are lying / Under the grass and under the sky…’

  Other poets seemed even less guarded when mourning the deaths of their fellow soldiers. Robert Nichols’s distinctly overwrought but astonishingly popular Ardours and Endurances (1917) is one of several volumes of war poetry included with some justification in Murray’s catalogue: Sorrow of War by Louis Golding (now best known as a writer of novels on Jewish themes), James S. Yates’s War Lyrics and Other Poems, T.P. Cameron Wilson’s Magpies in Picardy (all published in 1919) and Fabian S. Woodley’s A Crown of Friendship (1921) each find their place there. There is clearly some correspondence between poems celebrating the transient beauty of boys and those commemorating the deaths of young men in battle, a correspondence that becomes clear in Woodley’s volume, where the theme unblushingly outlined in such poems as ‘The Vision’ and ‘To G.O’C.’ is returned to in the section of ‘Verses Written During the War’.

  Something similar is apparent in the far more sophisticated poems of Wilfred Owen, several of which would not seem out of place in the Artist and Journal of Home Culture, where a good deal of Uranian literature appeared. Verses such as ‘It was a navy boy’, ‘To the Bitter Sweet-Heart: A Dream’ and ‘Who is the god of Canongate?’ were not at first regarded as canonical, but their relationship to such war poems as ‘I saw his round mouth’s crimson’, ‘Arms and the Boy’, ‘Greater Love’ and ‘Futility’ now seems obvious. Born and brought up in Housman Country, in 1913 Owen had written a long poem titled ‘Uriconium: An Ode’, which brings to mind Housman’s about Wenlock Edge, with its similar setting and its elision of past and present. In addition, the sense of ancient violence in Owen’s poem recalls ‘The Welsh Marches’ (XXVIII), which is set in Owen’s home town of Shrewsbury. Owen, however, unlike Housman, was a freq
uent and fascinated visitor to the excavations of Uriconium (or Viroconium) at Wroxeter, and his inspiration may simply have been local history rather than a literary elder.

  Owen too, though from a different direction, looked out across the landscape that formed Housman’s childhood horizon: ‘The hills of Cheshire and Shropshire, steep grassy ridges rising abruptly from the plain to flat tops covered in “herb and heather”, were always where his imagination felt most at home,’ his biographer Dominic Hibberd observed. ‘His attic room in Shrewsbury looked towards Haughmond Hill and the Wrekin, and beyond them to Caer Caradoc and the Long Mynd, those “landscapes whereupon my windows lean” which feature from time to time in his verse and letters and which seem to be reflected in the setting of “Spring Offensive”.’ While serving in France in 1917, Owen told his mother that the letters he received from his sixteen-year-old brother, Colin (whom he once addressed as ‘Darling Lad’), ‘bring me Shropshire as yours bring me Home’, and ‘Spring Offensive’, ostensibly set in Picardy, clearly incorporates a memory of the poet’s frequent walks in the Shropshire countryside. In his family memoir, Owen’s other brother, Harold, recalled the family returning from an evening service in the village of Uffington to their home in Shrewsbury through water meadows spangled with buttercups. The wet petals from the flowers stuck to their boots, and seeing this Owen exclaimed that ‘Harold’s boots are blessed with gold’, an image that is carried directly into the poem, with the added poignancy that the blessing the natural world bestows upon soldiers takes place in a tranquil landscape that will shortly erupt into a murderous and annihilating battle. As for Blunden and Sassoon, the beauties of nature provide Owen with a stark contrast to the death and destruction amidst which he finds himself at the front; he was, like Housman, a keen botanist and once wrote that ‘bluebells, it may be, more than Greek iambics, fitted me for my job’.