Housman Country
Page 57
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’
Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.
Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
There was a king reigned in the east:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
– I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.
LXIII
I hoed and trenched and weeded,
And took the flowers to fair:
I brought them home unheeded;
The hue was not the wear.
So up and down I sow them
For lads like me to find,
When I shall lie below them,
A dead man out of mind.
Some seed the birds devour,
And some the season mars,
But here and there will flower
The solitary stars,
And fields will yearly bear them
As light-leaved spring comes on,
And luckless lads will wear them
When I am dead and gone.
THE END
ALSO BY PETER PARKER
The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos
Ackerley: A Life of J. R. Ackerley
A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel
A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers
Isherwood: A Life Revealed
The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Parker is the author of The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos, biographies of J. R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood, and The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War. He edited (and wrote much of) A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel and A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. He was also an associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and his edition of G. F. Green’s 1952 novel In the Making was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2012. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has written for The Telegraph, The Spectator, Apollo, and The Times Literary Supplement. Born on a Herefordshire farm, he now lives in London’s East End. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Preface
I England in Your Pocket
II The Man and His Book
III English Landscape
IV English Music
V English Soldiers
VI The Rediscovery of England
VII Aftermaths
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A Shropshire Lad
Also by Peter Parker
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2016 by Peter Parker
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2016 by Little, Brown, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Parker, Peter, 1954–author.
Title: Housman country: into the heart of England / Peter Parker.
Description: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.|Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016045041|ISBN 9780374173043 (hardback)|ISBN 9780374709358 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Housman, A. E. (Alfred Edward), 1859–1936—Criticism and interpretation.|Housman, A. E. (Alfred Edward), 1859–1936. Shropshire lad.|English poetry—19th century—History and criticism.|National characteristics, English, in literature.|BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.|BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary.
Classification: LCC PR4809.H15 P37 2017|DDC 821/.912—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045041
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* ‘Appear’ because the 1888 diary is the only one to survive intact; of the other three diaries only fourteen detached pages survive, presumably torn from the binding by Laurence Housman.
* Elzevir was a Dutch publishing house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries renowned for producing pocket editions of classical texts, among them the works of Terence (1635).
* Rooms in Cambridge were designed with two doors at their entrances. If the outer door was open, visitors were welcome to knock on the inner one; but if the occupant had closed the outer door (‘sported the oak’), he was either absent or wished not to be disturbed.
* ‘Larry’ may have been a boy who blacked boots for Miss Patchett’s lodgers.
* As Housman might have noted: ‘Pronounced Onny’ – and indeed this is how it is more usually spelled. It is unclear where Housman found this variation. The small town of Onibury (with a single rather than a double ‘n’, but still pronounced with a short ‘o’) derives its name from the river.
* Housman’s influence upon Masefield has not, perhaps, been much explored. ‘I had a very great admiration for his poems,’ Masefield wrote on Housman’s death. That this admiration was of long standing may be seen from such poems as ‘On Malvern Hill’ (published in Salt-Water Ballads, 1902), which in its title, prosody, vocabulary and theme (that of ‘the wind’s riot’ evoking the ghosts of long-dead Romans) is more or less a recapitulation of ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’.
* Somewhat confusingly, since ‘Willie’ was her own pet name for herself, Cather used this term to denote effeminate or homosexual youths, of whom she disapproved.
* William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75) was an English composer, conductor, pianist and teacher, admired by both Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, and was in succession Professor of Music at Cambridge and Principal of the Royal Academy of Music.
* Although of Italian birth, Clementi was brought to England at the age of thirteen under the patronage of Peter Beckford (cousin of the more notorious William) and subsequently made his life there as a composer, performer and first director of the Philharmonic Society. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
* Of the nine recordings I have, only Peter Pears and Anthony Rolfe-Johnson get it right.
* The quotation is from a broadcast made earlier that year, by Britten’s friend and sometime librettist William Plomer, to mark the centenary of Housman’s birth.
* Since Bredon is a single hill, it is possible that ‘the Bredon Hills’ is a misprint for ‘the Breidden Hills’, which are on the Shropshire–Montgomeryshire border.
* The original Philebus was the defender of hedonism in one of Plato’s Socratic dialogues; this one was a medic serving in the merchant navy. ‘Ladslove’ or ‘lad’s love’, conveniently enough, is one of the English names for the pungent-leafed plant Artemisia abrotanum, which led to a certain amount of covert Uranian punning. Among J.G. Nicholson’s publications are not only A Garland of Ladslove (1911) but also A Chaplet of Southernwood (1896), southernwood being an alternative name for the plant.
* He is wrong, however, to suggest that ‘As a name especially of a beloved boy who is dead (cf Sassoon’s “The Effect”: “When Dick was killed last week he looked like that. / Flapping along the fire-step like a fish”), “Dick” may derive from Housman’s “The Night is Freezing Fast”.’ The poem he refers to was not published until after the war, in 1922 as no. XX of Last Poems; Sassoon’s poem was written in the summer of 1917.
* Hanging in chains was called keeping sheep by moonlight.
* Pronounced Breedon.