by Peter Parker
musical settings of AEH’s poems; by Butterworth; Evans-Newman dispute (1918); by Gurney; in interwar period; by Ireland; jazz settings; by Moeran; most popular choices; by Orr; and rock music tradition; by Somervell; songs inspired by Last Poems; by Vaughan Williams
Musical Settings of Late Victorian and Modern British Literature (catalogue, 1976)
Musical Times
Narcissus legend
Nash, John
Nash, Paul
Nashe, Thomas
National Museum of Popular Culture, Craven Arms
National Training School for Music (NTSM)
National Trust
Neo-paganism
Nesmith, Michael
Newbolt, Henry
Newbould, Frank
Newman, Ernest
Nichols, Beverley
Nichols, Robert
Nicholson, John Gambrill
Nicholson, Norman
Nightingale, Joseph
nostalgia
Onibury, Shropshire
Onny, River
Ordnance Survey
Orr, Charles Wilfred
Orwell, George
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Owen, Wilfred
Oxford, University of
Oxford House Mission
Page, Norman
Palgrave, Francis, The Golden Treasury (1861)
Pals Battalions
Parratt, Walter
Parry, Hubert
Partridge, Bernard
Pater, Walter
Pears, Peter
Peel, Graham
Peele, Michael
Percy, Walker
Perry Hall (family home, Bromsgrove)
Perzinski, Matt (The Agrarians)
Petronius
Piper, John
Plato
Plomer, William
‘Poems on the Underground’ initiative
Pollard, A.W.
Pollet, Maurice
Polly Bolton Band
Pope, Peter
Poston, Elizabeth
Potter, Dennis
Pottipher, Charles
Pound, Ezra
Powell, Enoch
Pre-Raphaelites
Priestley, J.B.
Priestley-Smith, Hugh
Propertius, Sextus
public schools
Purcell, Henry
Quieter than Spiders (band)
Quiller-Couch, Arthur
Quinton, A.R.
railway companies
Raleigh, Sir Walter (Oxford professor)
Ramblers’ Association
Ravel, Maurice
Raven, Michael
Rawlins, Cyril
Reade, Brian
Redgrave-Cripps, Alfred
Renault, Mary
Rhymers’ Club
Rhys, Ernest
Richards, Grant; Housman 1897–1936 (memoir, 1941); and Last Poems; and musical settings; and risqué books
Richards, I.A.
‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ (song)
Robert of Gloucester
Robinson, William
Roeg, Nicolas
Romantic poets
Rosenberg, Isaac
Ross, David
Ross, Robbie
Rossetti, Christina
Rossetti, D.G.
Rothenstein, William
Royal Academy of Art
Royal Academy of Music
Royal College of Music
Rubble, Billey R.
‘Rule, Britannia!’ (song)
Ruskin, John
Saale, S.S.
Sappho
Sassoon, Siegfried
Sayers, Dorothy L.
Schmitz, Oscar
Schubert, Franz
Schumann, Robert
Scott, Marion
Scott, Sir Walter
Scottish Border ballads
Second World War
Seeley, J.R.
Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (1890, 1906)
Selected Poems of A.E. Housman (USA, 1943)
Severn, River
Shakespeare, William
Shanks, Edward
Sharp, Cecil
Shaw-Stewart, Patrick
Shell County Guides
Shrewsbury
Shropshire; ‘A walk in Housman Country’ (2009); AEH’s western horizon; Coleridge in; pilgrims to Housman Country; and soldiering
A Shropshire Lad (AEH, 1896): AEH on; cover price; dating of individual poems; elements of dark comedy; exile theme; first edition (February 1896); literary sources; longevity of; manuscript donated to Trinity College; melancholy; memorable images and phrases; and modernity; original title of; ‘pocket’ editions; recurring words; reviews; rhyme scheme; sales; search for a narrative/scheme; second and further editions of; sequencing of poems; thematically related poems; titles of poems; topographical anomalies; use of place-names; writing of poems
A Shropshire Lad (AEH, 1896) poems (‘m’ indicates a musical setting): I 1887; II ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, III ‘The Recruit’, IV ‘Reveille’, V ‘Oh see how thick the goldcup flowers’; VI ‘When the lad for longing sighs’, VII ‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow’, VIII ‘Farewell to barn and stack and tree’, IX ‘On moonlit heath and lonesome bank’; X ‘March’, XI ‘On your midnight pallet lying’, XIII ‘When I was one-and-twenty’, XIV ‘There pass the careless people’, XV ‘Look not in my eyes, for fear’, XVI ‘It nods and curtseys and recovers’; XVII ‘Twice a week the winter thorough’, XVIII ‘Oh, when I was in love with you’, XIX ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’, XX ‘Oh fair enough are sky and plain’, XXI ‘Bredon Hill’, XXII ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’, XXIII ‘The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair’, XXIV ‘Say, lad, have you things to do?’, XXV ‘This time of year a twelvemonth past’, XXVI ‘Along the field as we came by’, XXVII ‘Is my team ploughing’, XXVIII ‘The Welsh Marches’; XXIX ‘The Lent Lily’, XXX ‘Others, I am not the first’; XXXI ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’; XXXII ‘From far, from eve and morning’, XXXIII ‘If truth in hearts that perish’, XXXIV ‘The New Mistress’, XXXV ‘On the idle hill of summer’, XXXVI ‘White in the moon the long road lies’, XXXVII ‘As through the wild green hills of Wyre’; XXXVIII ‘The winds out of the west land blow’; XXXIX ‘’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town’, XL ‘Into my heart an air that kills’, XLI ‘In my own shire, if I was sad’; XLII ‘The Merry Guide’; XLIII ‘The Immortal Part’; XLIV ‘Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?’; XLV ‘If it chance your eye offend you’; XLVII ‘The Carpenter’s Son’; XLIX ‘Think no more, lad; laugh, be jolly’, L ‘In valleys of springs of rivers’; LI ‘Loitering with a vacant eye’; LII ‘Far in a western brookland’, LIII ‘The True Lover’; LIV ‘With rue my heart is laden’, LVI ‘The Day of Battle’; LVII ‘You smile upon your friend to-day’, LVIII ‘When I came last to Ludlow’, LIX ‘The Isle of Portland’, LX ‘Now hollow fires burn out to black’; LXI ‘Hughley Steeple’; LXII ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’, LXIII ‘I hoed and trenched and weeded’
Simcox, George Augustus
Simpsons, The
Sitwell, Osbert and Sacheverell
Skeat, W.W.
Smiths, The (band)
Somervell, Arthur
Sophocles
Sorley, Charles Hamilton
Souls circle
South African/Boer Wars
Southampton, University of
Southgate, Walter
Spencer, Herbert
Spenser, Edmund
Squire, J.C.
St George
St John’s College, Oxford
Stainer, John
Stanford, Charles Villiers
Stead, W.T.
Stephen, Sir Leslie
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Stone, Mark
Stoppard, Tom
Stoytcheva, Stanislava
Stratford-upon-Avon
Strauss, Richard
Sullivan, Arthur
Sutherland, Graham
Sutherland, James
Swift, Katherine
Symbolist poets
Symonds, John Addington
Symons, Arthur
Symons, Clement (nephew of AEH)
Symons, Jerry (nephew of AEH)
Symons, Katharine E. (sister of AEH)
Tabor, June,
television
Teme, River
Tennyson, Alfred
Tewkesbury Abbey
Thackeray, W.M.
Thames Rowing Club
Theocritus
‘There’ll Always Be an England’ (Parker and Charles song)
Thiepval Memorial
Thomas, Edward
Thomas, Helen
Thomson, J.J.
Thomson, Joan
Thompson, Herbert
Three Choirs Festival
Thucydides
Timperley, H.W.
Tolstoy, Leo
Treigbut (band)
Tressell, Robert
Trinity College, Cambridge
Turing, Alan
Turner, J.M.W.
Twilight Zone, The
United States of America (USA)
University College, London (UCL); AEH’s Introductory Lecture
Untermeyer, Louis
Uranian poets
Vale, Edmund
Van der Weyde, Henry
Vanbrugh, John
Vaughan Williams, Ralph; Along the Field; and Butterworth; and Gurney; The Lark Ascending; On Wenlock Edge
Venables, Ian
Verlaine, Paul
Vicari, Andrea
Vickers, Salley
Victoria, Queen, Golden Jubilee (1887)
Virgil
Wagner, Richard
Walker, Paul
Walton, Izaak
war memorials
war poetry
Warlock, Peter
Watson, Edward
Waugh, Alec
Webb, Captain Matthew
Webb, Mary
Webber, Dave
Weber, Carl J.
Weir, Frances
Welch, Denton
Wells, H.G.
Wenlock Edge, Shropshire
Wethered, Geoffrey
Wheeler Wilcox, Ella
Whistler, Rex
White, Gilbert
White, T.H.
White, William
Whittingham, Kevin Robert
Wilde, Oscar; ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’; trials of (1895)
Williams, John
Williams, Stephen
Williamson, John R.
Wilson, Edmund
Wilson, Stanley
Wilson, Steuart
Wilson, T.P. Cameron
Wise, Elizabeth
Withers, Percy
Wolf, Hugo
Wolfe, Charles
Woodchester, Gloucestershire
Woodley, Fabian S.
Wood’s Shropshire Beers
Woolf, Virginia
Worcestershire; Bromsgrove; Broom Hill (‘Mount Pisgah’); Fockbury House
Wordsworth, Dorothy
Wordsworth, William
Wrekin, the
Wyre Forest, Shropshire and Worcestershire
Yardley (cosmetics company)
Yates, James S.
Yeats, W.B.
Young, Dalhousie
Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA)
youth; AEH’s western horizon; appeal of AEH’s poetry to; and early death; and ephemeral nature of life; male adolescence; romanticised classical ideas; suicidal impulse; as ‘the land of lost content’
Youth Hostels Association
YouTube
Zabel, Morton D.
Zogaj, Shpetim
A SHROPSHIRE LAD
by
A.E. Housman
I
1887
From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,
The shires have seen it plain,
From north and south the sign returns
And beacons burn again.
Look left, look right, the hills are bright,
The dales are light between,
Because ’tis fifty years to-night
That God has saved the Queen.
Now, when the flame they watch not towers
About the soil they trod,
Lads, we’ll remember friends of ours
Who shared the work with God.
To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night:
Themselves they could not save.
It dawns in Asia, tombstones show
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn’s dead.
We pledge in peace by farm and town
The Queen they served in war,
And fire the beacons up and down
The land they perished for.
‘God save the Queen’ we living sing,
From height to height ’tis heard;
And with the rest your voices ring,
Lads of the Fifty-third.
Oh, God will save her, fear you not:
Be you the men you’ve been,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
And God will save the Queen.
II
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
III
The Recruit
Leave your home behind, lad,
And reach your friends your hand,
And go, and luck go with you
While Ludlow tower shall stand.
Oh, come you home of Sunday
When Ludlow streets are still
And Ludlow bells are calling
To farm and lane and mill,
Or come you home of Monday
When Ludlow market hums
And Ludlow chimes are playing
‘The conquering hero comes,’
Come you home a hero,
Or come not home at all,
The lads you leave will mind you
Till Ludlow tower shall fall.
And you will list the bugle
That blows in lands of morn,
And make the foes of England
Be sorry you were born.
And you till trump of doomsday
On lands of morn may lie,
And make the hearts of comrades
Be heavy where you die.
Leave your home behind you,
Your friends by field and town:
Oh, town and field will mind you
Till Ludlow tower is down.
IV
Reveille
Wake: the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims.
Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,
Trampled to the floor it spanned,
And the tent of night in tatters
Straws the sky-pavilioned land.
Up, lad, up, ’tis late for lying:
Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
‘Who’ll beyond the hills away?’
Towns and countries woo together,
Forelands beacon, belfries call;
Never lad that trod on leather
Lived to feast his heart wit
h all.
Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.
V
Oh see how thick the goldcup flowers
Are lying in field and lane,
With dandelions to tell the hours
That never are told again.
Oh may I squire you round the meads
And pick you posies gay?
– ’Twill do no harm to take my arm.
‘You may, young man, you may.’
Ah, spring was sent for lass and lad,
’Tis now the blood runs gold,
And man and maid had best be glad
Before the world is old.
What flowers to-day may flower to-morrow,
But never as good as new.
– Suppose I wound my arm right round –
‘’Tis true, young man, ’tis true.’
Some lads there are, ’tis shame to say,
That only court to thieve,
And once they bear the bloom away
’Tis little enough they leave.
Then keep your heart for men like me
And safe from trustless chaps.
My love is true and all for you.
‘Perhaps, young man, perhaps.’
Oh, look in my eyes then, can you doubt?
– Why, ’tis a mile from town.
How green the grass is all about!
We might as well sit down.
– Ah, life, what is it but a flower?
Why must true lovers sigh?
Be kind, have pity, my own, my pretty, –
‘Good-bye, young man, good-bye.’
VI
When the lad for longing sighs,
Mute and dull of cheer and pale,
If at death’s own door he lies,
Maiden, you can heal his ail.
Lovers’ ills are all to buy:
The wan look, the hollow tone,
The hung head, the sunken eye,
You can have them for your own.
Buy them, buy them: eve and morn
Lovers’ ills are all to sell.
Then you can lie down forlorn;
But the lover will be well.
VII