The basalt mountain sprang to dust,
The blazing pier of diamond flawed
In shards of rainbows all abroad.
What found he, that the heavens stand fast?
What pillar proven firm at last
Bears up so light that world-seen span?
The heart of man, the heart of man.
XVI
Some can gaze and not be sick
But I could never learn the trick.
There’s this to say for blood and breath,
They give a man a taste for death.
XVII
The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do:
My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.
But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest,
The brains in my head and the heart in my breast.
Oh, grant me the ease that is granted so free,
The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,
That relish their victuals and rest on their bed
With flint in the bosom and guts in the head.
XVIII
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 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.
XIX
The Defeated
In battles of no renown
My fellows and I fall down,
And over the dead men roar
The battles they lost before.
The thunderstruck flagstaffs fall,
The earthquake breaches the wall,
The far-felled steeples resound,
And I lie under the ground.
O soldiers, saluted afar
By them that have seen your star,
In conquest and freedom and pride
Remember your friends that died.
Amidst rejoicing and song
Remember, my lads, how long,
How deep the innocent trod
The grapes of the anger of God.
XX
I shall not die for you,
Another fellow may;
Good lads are left and true
Though one departs away.
But he departs to-day
And leaves his work to do,
For I was luckless aye
And shall not die for you.
XXI
New Year’s Eve
The end of the year fell chilly
Between a moon and a moon;
Thorough the twilight shrilly
The bells rang, ringing no tune.
The windows stained with story,
The walls with miracle scored,
Were hidden for gloom and glory
Filling the house of the Lord.
Arch and aisle and rafter
And roof-tree dizzily high
Were full of weeping and laughter
And song and saying good-bye.
There stood in the holy places
A multitude none could name,
Ranks of dreadful faces
Flaming, transfigured in flame.
Crown and tiar and mitre
Were starry with gold and gem;
Christmas never was whiter
Than fear on the face of them.
In aisles that emperors vaulted
For a faith the world confessed,
Abasing the Host exalted,
They worshipped towards the west.
They brought with laughter oblation;
They prayed, not bowing the head;
They made without tear lamentation,
And rendered me answer and said:
‘O thou that seest our sorrow,
It fares with us even thus:
To-day we are gods, to-morrow
Hell have mercy on us.
‘Lo, morning over our border
From out of the west comes cold;
Down ruins the ancient order
And empire builded of old.
‘Our house at even is queenly
With psalm and censers alight:
Look thou never so keenly
Thou shalt not find us to-night.
‘We are come to the end appointed
With sands not many to run:
Divinities disanointed
And kings whose kingdom is done.
‘The peoples knelt down at our portal,
All kindreds under the sky;
We were gods and implored and immortal
Once; and to-day we die.’
They turned them again to their praying,
They worshipped and took no rest
Singing old tunes and saying
‘We have seen his star in the west,’
Old tunes of the sacred psalters,
Set to wild farewells;
And I left them there at their altars
Ringing their own dead knells.
XXII
R. L. S.
Home is the sailor, home from sea:
Her far-borne canvas furled,
The ship pours shining on the quay
The plunder of the world.
Home is the hunter from the hill:
Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
And every fowl of air.
’Tis evening on the moorland free,
The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
The hunter from the hill.
XXIII
The Olive
The olive in its orchard
Should now be rooted sure,
To cast abroad its branches
And flourish and endure.
Aloft amid the trenches
Its dressers dug and died
The olive in its orchard
Should prosper and abide.
Close should the fruit be clustered
And light the leaf should wave,
So deep the root is planted
In the corrupting grave.
TRANSLATIONS
Aeschylus, Septem Contra Thebas (lines 848–60)
Now do our eyes behold
The tidings which were told:
Twin fallen kings, twin perished hopes to mourn,
The slayer, the slain,
The entangled doom forlorn
And ruinous end of twain.
Say, is not sorrow, is not sorrow’s sum
On home and hearthstone come?
O waft with sighs the sail from shore,
O smite the bosom, cadencing the oar
That rows beyond the rueful stream for aye
To the far strand,
The ship of souls, the dark,
The unreturning bark
Whereon light never falls nor foot of Day,
Ev’n to the bourne of all, to the unbeholden land.
Sophocles, Oedipus Coloneus (lines 1211–48)
What man is he that yearneth
For length unmeasured of days?
Folly mine eye discerneth
&nb
sp; Encompassing all his ways.
For years over-running the measure
Shall change thee in evil wise:
Grief draweth nigh thee; and pleasure,
Behold, it is hid from thine eyes.
This to their wage have they
Which overlive their day.
And He that looseth from labour
Doth one with other befriend,
Whom bride nor bridesmen attend,
Song, nor sound of the tabor,
Death, that maketh an end.
Thy portion esteem I highest,
Who wast not ever begot;
Thine next, being born who diest
And straightway again art not.
With follies light as the feather
Doth Youth to man befall;
Then evils gather together,
There wants not one of them all –
Wrath, envy, discord, strife,
The sword that seeketh life.
And sealing the sum of trouble
Doth tottering Age draw nigh,
Whom friends and kinsfolk fly,
Age, upon whom redouble
All sorrows under the sky.
This man, as me, even so,
Have the evil days overtaken;
And like as a cape sea-shaken
With tempest at earth’s last verges
And shock of all winds that blow,
His head the seas of woe,
The thunders of awful surges
Ruining overflow;
Blown from the fall of even,
Blown from the dayspring forth,
Blown from the noon in heaven,
Blown from night and the North.
Euripides, Alcestis (lines 962–1005)
In heaven-high musings and many,
Far seeking and deep debate,
Of strong things find I not any
That is as the strength of Fate.
Help nor healing is told
In soothsayings uttered of old,
In the Thracian runes, the verses
Engraven of Orpheus’ pen;
No balm of virtue to save
Apollo aforetime gave,
Who stayeth with tender mercies
The plagues of the children of men.
She hath not her habitation
In temples that hands have wrought;
Him that bringeth oblation,
Behold, she heedeth him naught.
Be thou not wroth with us more,
O mistress, than heretofore;
For what God willeth soever,
That thou bringest to be;
Thou breakest in sunder the brand
Far forged in the Iron Land;
Thine heart is cruel, and never
Came pity anigh unto thee.
Thee too, O King, hath she taken
And bound in her tenfold chain;
Yet faint not, neither complain:
The dead thou wilt not awaken
For all thy weeping again.
They perish, whom gods begot;
The night releaseth them not.
Beloved was she that died
And dear shall ever abide,
For this was the queen among women, Admetus, that lay by thy side.
Not as the multitude lowly
Asleep in their sepulchres,
Not as their grave be hers,
But like as the gods held holy,
The worship of wayfarers.
Yea, all that travel the way
Far off shall see it and say,
Lo, erst for her lord she died,
To-day she sitteth enskied;
Hail, lady, be gracious to usward; that alway her honour abide.
THE NAME AND NATURE OF POETRY
The Leslie Stephen Lecture Delivered by A. E. Housman at Cambridge on 9 May 1933
The question should be fairly stated, how far a man can be an adequate, or even a good (so far as he goes) though inadequate critic of poetry, who is not a poet, at least in posse. Can he be an adequate, can he be a good critic, though not commensurate? But there is yet another distinction. Supposing he is not only not a poet, but is a bad poet! What then?
Coleridge, Anima Poetae, pp. 127f.
It is my first duty to acknowledge the honour done me by those who have in their hands the appointment of the Leslie Stephen Lecturer, and to thank them for this token of their good will. My second duty is to say that I condemn their judgement and deplore their choice. It is twenty-two years to-day since I last, and first, spoke in this Senate-House; and in delivering my inaugural lecture, and telling this University what it was not to expect from me, I used these words.
Whether the faculty of literary criticism is the best gift that Heaven has in its treasuries I cannot say; but Heaven seems to think so, for assuredly it is the gift most charily bestowed. Orators and poets, sages and saints and heroes, if rare in comparison with blackberries, are commoner than returns of Halley’s comet: literary critics are less common. And when, once in a century, or once in two centuries, the literary critic does appear – will someone in this home of mathematics tell me what are the chances that his appearance will be made among that small number of people who are called classical scholars? If this purely accidental conjunction occurred so lately as the eighteenth century in the person of Lessing, it ought to be a long while before it occurs again; and if so early a century as the twentieth is to witness it in another person, all I know is that I am not he.
In these twenty-two years I have improved in some respects and deteriorated in others; but I have not so much improved as to become a literary critic, nor so much deteriorated as to fancy that I have become one. Therefore you are not about to be addressed in that tone of authority which is appropriate to those who are, and is assumed by some of those who conceive themselves to be, literary critics. In order to hear Jehovah thundering out of Zion, or Little Bethel, you must go elsewhere.
But all my life long the best literature of several languages has been my favourite recreation; and good literature continually read for pleasure must, let us hope, do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. But personal opinions they remain, not truths to be imparted as such with the sureness of superior insight and knowledge. I hope however that for brevity’s sake, and your own, you will accept the disclaimer once for all, and that when hereafter I may say that things are thus or thus, you will not insist on my saying instead that I humbly venture to conceive them so or that I diffidently offer the suggestion to your better judgement.
There is indeed one literary subject on which I think I could discourse with profit, because it is also scientific, so that a man of science can handle it without presumption, and indeed is fitter for the task than most men of letters. The Artifice of Versification, which I first thought of taking for my theme to-day, has underlying it a set of facts which are unknown to most of those who practise it; and their success, when they succeed, is owing to instinctive tact and a natural goodness of ear. This latent base, comprising natural laws by which all versification is conditioned, and the secret springs of the pleasure which good versification can give, is little explored by critics: a few pages of Coventry Patmore and a few of Frederic Myers contain all, so far as I know, or all of value, which has been written on such matters;* and to these pages I could add a few more. But they would not make a good lecture: first, because of their fewness; secondly, because of their dryness; and thirdly, because they might not be easy for listeners to follow, and what I had to say would be more clearly communicated by writing than by speech. For these reasons I renounced my first intention, and chose instead a subject much less precise, and therefore less suitable to my capacity, but yet one which may be treated, as I hope to treat it, with some degree of precision.
When one begins to discuss the nature of poetry, the first impediment in the way is the inherent vagueness of the name, a
nd the number of its legitimate senses. It is not bad English to speak of ‘prose and poetry’ in the sense of ‘prose and verse’. But it is wasteful; it squanders a valuable word by stretching it to fit a meaning which is accurately expressed by a wider term. Verse may be, like ‘The Tale of Sir Thopas’ in the judgement of Our Host of the Tabard, ‘rym dogerel’; and the name of poetry is generally restricted to verse which can at least be called literature, though it may differ from prose only in its metrical form, and be superior to prose only in the superior comeliness of that form itself, and the superior terseness which usually goes along with it. Then further there is verse which gives a positive and lively pleasure arising from the talent and accomplishment of its author.
Now Gilpin had a pleasant wit
And loved a timely joke,
And thus unto the Callender
In merry guise he spoke:
I came because your horse would come;
And, if I well forbode,
My hat and wig will soon be here:
They are upon the road.
Capital: but no one, if asked for a typical example of poetry, would recite those verses in reply. A typical example need not be any less plain and simple and straightforward, but it would be a little raised.
Come, worthy Greek, Ulysses, come,
Possess these shores with me:
The winds and seas are troublesome,
And here we may be free.
Here may we sit and view their toil
That travail in the deep,
And joy the day in mirth the while,
And spend the night in sleep.
There we are ceasing to gallop with the Callender’s horse and beginning to fly with Pegasus. Indeed a promising young poetaster could not do better than lay up that stanza in his memory, not necessarily as a pattern to set before him, but as a touchstone to keep at his side. Diction and movement alike, it is perfect. It is made out of the most ordinary words, yet it is pure from the least alloy of prose; and however much nearer heaven the art of poetry may have mounted, it has never flown on a surer or a lighter wing.
It is perfect, I say; and nothing more than perfection can be demanded of anything: yet poetry is capable of more than this, and more therefore is expected from it. There is a conception of poetry which is not fulfilled by pure language and liquid versification, with the simple and so to speak colourless pleasure which they afford, but involves the presence in them of something which moves and touches in a special and recognizable way. Set beside that stanza of Daniel’s these lines from Bruce’s or Logan’s ‘Cuckoo’:
A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems Page 10