by Alan Bennett
Strange stars amid the gloam.
III
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
That poem – the young soldier killed far from home and his grave watched over by alien stars – calls to mind the poet whom I shall be turning to next, A. E. Housman. But I’ll end with a little nature poem and one that is, for Hardy, almost cheerful.
Proud Songsters
The thrushes sing as the sun is going,
And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,
And as it gets dark loud nightingales
In bushes,
Pipe, as they can when April wears,
As if all Time were theirs.
These are brand-new birds of twelve-months’ growing,
Which a year ago, or less than twain,
No finches were, nor nightingales,
Nor thrushes,
But only particles of grain,
And earth, and air, and rain.
A. E. Housman
1859–1936
Alfred Edward Housman, son of a solicitor and eldest of seven siblings, was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, and educated at St John’s College, Oxford. Failing his finals, he found work as a clerk in the London Patent Office but continued to study the classics, publishing articles when he could. In 1892, ten years after leaving Oxford, he was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and, in 1911, at Cambridge. His first poetry collection, A Shropshire Lad, was published in 1896, followed by Last Poems in 1922 and More Poems in 1936. His principal scholarly concern was to ensure the authenticity of old texts, and he has been highly praised by classicists for his editions of Roman poets including Juvenal, Lucan and Manilius. After his death and burial in Ludlow, Shropshire, many composers – among them Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney, George Butterworth and the American Samuel Barber – set his poems to music.
On Wenlock Edge
(from A Shropshire Lad)
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
My dear sir,
You seem to admire my poems even more than I admire them myself, which is very noble of you, but will most likely be difficult to keep up for any great length of time.
As to your queries: I wrote the book, A Shropshire Lad, when I was thirty-five and I expect to write another when I am seventy, by which time your enthusiasm will have had time to cool. My trade is that of Professor of Latin in this college: I suppose that my classical training has been of some use to me in furnishing good models, and making me fastidious, and telling me what to leave out. My chief object in publishing my verses was to give pleasure to a few young men here and there, and I am glad if they have given pleasure to you.
I am yours very truly,
A. E. HOUSMAN
Housman had been brought up and educated as a child in Worcestershire, and his poems are set in the counties of his boyhood: Worcestershire, Shropshire and the Welsh Marches. He practised what – in the above letter, written to the American poet Witter Bynner in June 1903 – he called his ‘trade’ as professor of Latin at University College London, and in 1911 he moved to Cambridge, so apart from a period as a civil servant when he was a young man, he was a don and a professor all his adult life. He was also a poet all his life, insofar as, long before he published any poetry, he was keeping notebooks. His output didn’t follow quite the restricted pattern his letter suggests, but he was never prolific, most of his energies going into his academic work. In this he was pre-eminent, one of the foremost scholars of his time, whose range and scholarship were so formidable he might just as easily have become a professor of Greek as a professor of Latin.
Housman was not an easy man. Timid in appearance – someone said of him that he looked as if he came from a long line of maiden aunts – he could be caustic and severe, and was ruthless with intellects less gifted than his own and with any form of slipshod work. ‘The faintest of all human passions’, he said, ‘is the love of truth,’ but not with him, and from that love of truth came a mistrust of religion as profound as that of Hardy. But he was shy and austere. Virginia Woolf used to talk of T. S. Eliot and his four-piecesuits, and though Housman’s poetry is nothing if not confessional, he was even more buttoned up than Eliot, whose ‘I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled’ has an echo in Housman.
From the Wash
(from More Poems)
From the wash the laundress sends
My collars home with ravelled ends:
I must fit, now these are frayed,
My neck with new ones London-made.
Homespun collars, homespun hearts,
Wear to rags in foreign parts.
Mine at least’s as good as done,
And I must get a London one.
One gets from the poems – and if one were to select them almost at random, it would be the same – the notes Housman sounds again and again in his verse, his tonic sol-fa: youth, a glory that cannot last, a sunset light and death that is just over the horizon, with only the best dying young. The thought is classical, but, in the way Housman hitches death to war or to the gallows or to suicide, it is a romantic vision, and over it all there is the sense of lost love. And the other element that one picks up as these soldiers go off to war, or to some other distant dying, is that the poet is a bystander. He has no part in these deaths, or if he does, it is because he has no part in these lives.
To an Athlete Dying Young
(from A Shropshire Lad)
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
Housman’s first b
ook of poems from which that poem was taken was called A Shropshire Lad, but he had no rural connections and didn’t even know Shropshire very well. The son of a Worcestershire solicitor, he went to Bromsgrove School, then to Oxford, lived for a while in London and spent the rest of his life in Cambridge. So the personnel of his poetry was invented and the landscape a setting.
What was at the heart of his writing, at any rate to begin with, was an unrequited passion for a fellow Oxford undergraduate, Moses Jackson – a thoroughly straightforward, unreflective young man who, if he was ever aware of Housman’s affection, chose that it should never be made specific. In a less single-minded character than Housman’s, such a passion might have been expected to pass and be replaced by other, perhaps happier, affections. And insofar as Housman became friendly with Jackson’s younger brother, it may have done so. But the brother died and Housman was left with these affections, and the memory of them, all his life. Jackson went off to India, became principal of a teacher training college there and then took a similar post in Canada. A Shropshire Lad is dedicated to him, but when asked what had caused him to write the poems, Housman said it was a period of mild ill-health – a prolonged sore throat.
Shake Hands
(from More Poems)
Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all’s 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, here’s luck, good-bye.
But if you come to a road where danger
Or guilt or anguish or shame’s to share,
Be good to the lad that loves you true
And the soul that was born to die for you,
And whistle and I’ll be there.
In the years that followed, the two friends met from time to time and Housman wrote regularly – but in the words of Auden’s poem, ‘Who’s Who’, Jackson ‘answered some of his long, marvellous letters, but kept none’.
Because I liked you better
(from More Poems)
Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.
To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
‘Good-bye,’ said you, ‘forget me.’
‘I will, no fear,’ said I.
If here, where clover whitens
The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,
Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.
Girls, it has to be said, only figure in Housman as an occasion for the deaths of boys. Their place in the scheme of things is to make lads unhappy so that they go off to war or hang themselves. This is sometimes quite difficult to take, and the word ‘lads’ is quite difficult to take now too, when its usage is largely confined to football managers: ‘The lads played a blinder.’ Jokes about Housman are easy to make, and with his simple forms and limited subject matter, his poetry has always been an easy target for parody, as in these verses by Hugh Kingsmill.
What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat ’tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl’s, and swing for it.
Like enough, you won’t be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon’s not the only thing
That’s cured by hanging from a string.
The next poem, a dialogue between a soldier and his sweetheart, owes something to Hardy, whom Housman admired.
The Deserter
(from Last Poems)
‘What sound awakened me, I wonder,
For now ’tis dumb.’
‘Wheels on the road most like, or thunder:
Lie down; ’twas not the drum.’
Toil at sea and two in haven
And trouble far:
Fly, crow, away, and follow, raven,
And all that croaks for war.
‘Hark, I heard the bugle crying,
And where am I?
My friends are up and dressed and dying,
And I will dress and die.’
‘Oh love is rare and trouble plenty
And carrion cheap,
And daylight dear at four-and-twenty:
Lie down again and sleep.’
‘Reach me my belt and leave your prattle:
Your hour is gone;
But my day is the day of battle,
And that comes dawning on.
‘They mow the field of man in season:
Farewell, my fair,
And, call it truth or call it treason,
Farewell the vows that were.’
‘Ay, false heart, forsake me lightly:
’Tis like the brave.
They find no bed to joy in rightly
Before they find the grave.
‘Their love is for their own undoing,
And east and west
They scour about the world a-wooing
The bullet to their breast.
‘Sail away the ocean over,
Oh sail away,
And lie there with your leaden lover
For ever and a day.’
Austere though Housman was, he could unbend with women and children, perhaps because, to him, they didn’t really count. I’m not sure that his poems actually appeal to women; certainly I couldn’t find any women critics who have written about them. When Housman was teaching at University College London his elaborate sarcasm would often reduce his women students to tears. Well, this they could just about take, but what really upset them was that, the following week, Housman could not remember which ones he had offended or even tell any of them apart.
A Shropshire Lad was written in 1894 and 1895. In the latter year, Housman wrote a much more explicit poem which was not included in the collection and was only published after his death. 1895 may have been the year of the publication of Housman’s poems, but it was also the year of the trials of Oscar Wilde.
Oh Who is that Young Sinner
(from Additional Poems)
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;
Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.
Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for all the world to see and stare,
And they’re haling him to justice for the colour of his hair.
Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet
And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.
It’s hard to imagine two writers more different than Housman and Wilde, but as one critic has said: ‘From Wenlock Edge, one can see as far as Reading Gaol.’ Housman saw it too and, after Wilde’s release, he sent him a copy of A Shropshire Lad. He used to say with some pride that Robert Ross, Wilde’s friend, had learned a few of the poems by heart and recited them to Wilde while he was still in gaol.
The occasion for Wilde’s poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was the hanging of a young soldier who had murdered his sweethe
art, a situation Housman would have found familiar. Like Hardy, he was fascinated by hanging. As a boy, Hardy had seen a woman hanged and it haunted him all his life, and in Housman, too, the gallows are always turning up.
Eight O’Clock
(from Last Poems)
He stood and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.
Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.
Another of Housman’s gallows verses reads:
But fetch the county kerchief
And noose me in the knot,
And I will rot.
The American lawyer Clarence Darrow amended the verse to make it read ‘Fetch the county sheriff / And noose me in the knot’ – and he got several murderers off by emotionally quoting the line to the jury. Housman said that it was partly due to him that Leopold and Loeb (who murdered a boy for kicks in the 1920s) escaped the gallows.
I did not lose my heart
(from More Poems)
I did not lose my heart in summer’s even,
When roses to the moonrise burst apart:
When plumes were under heel and lead was flying,
In blood and smoke and flame I lost my heart.
I lost it to a soldier and a foeman,
A chap that did not kill me, but he tried;
That took the sabre straight and took it striking
And laughed and kissed his hand to me and died.
Death in Housman is an instantaneous thing; his heroes don’t hang about. ‘Shot, so quick, so clean an ending’ is the general pattern. And as wars go, the Zulu Wars and the Boer War, which were Housman’s wars, were pretty hygienic. Wilfred Owen, who lived and died during Housman’s lifetime, told a different sort of truth about war, one which makes it difficult to regard the military element in Housman as little more than a stage setting, a useful prop. When the Great War came, and hundreds of thousands of young men died in battle, it might be thought that Housman would have been particularly affected. In fact, he appears not to have been, and this seems shocking. But poets are not statisticians; to them, one death means more than a thousand. When men are dying like flies, that is what they are dying like.