Poems of the Week–A.E. Housman
A.E. Housman was one of the finest Latin scholars of the 20th century and one of the most distinguished classicists of the Anglo-American world. He is better known, however, as a poet. He had suffered disappointments in life, and his response was the melancholy stoicism that permeates so much of his work. His poems are superficially simple but elegantly wrought. In honor of a later Queen's Jubilee, let us begin with Housman's tribute--rather uncharacteristically patriotic--to Victoria.
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 tonight: 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.
Perhaps his most famous poem is the one, almost Japanese in its elegance and
tact. Some critics have noted the way it turns back on itself at the end.
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.
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It dawns in Asia, tombstones show
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn's dead.
Jeepers, that poetic stuff is great, take it easy. Anyway, it's all good. Peace out.
There is much here that I like. It seems much more in praise of the English veterans than to the Queen.
To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The tie to the actual land that is so necessary for a true patriot. Something we've lost completely, especially in an age where we treat homes as "investments". I remember the scene from John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath", with those farmers clutching handfuls of dirt, and I understand that those patriots who fight fight first and foremost out of a love for a thing or a place and not an idea.
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.
I love this! How true it is that any civilization, all civilization, rests upon the shoulders of the families, and that the shirking of the family duty must be considered tantamount to treason. How true it is today that many of our father's fathers may have been great men, but something went awry in that generational jump and we are now the Rehoboams to our distant forefathering Davids. But if we once again got the children we should get, how quickly the tide could be turned. That we could have quivers full of arrows, then would the enemy be powerless.
No offense, obviously, to any out there. I speak foolishly in a general sense and of course know nothing about anyone's fathers let alone grandfathers or beyond.
I vaguely remember being taught some Housman in High School. I always remembered him as melancholy, and the only two poems I even partially remembered are "The Loveliest of Trees" and "Terence this is Stupid Stuff." I went and reread them after reading the poem here, and while I always remembered the moral of "Terence" I did not remember the humor. I think, at that early age, I made "Terence" a sort of cornerstone in my thinking, which has made me always prone to consider the darker side although, thanks to my lovely wife, never with melancholy.
Housman was a great favorite when I was a teenager and had just started to understand "real" life, that it could be hard, cruel even, and that people found it pretty easy to be bad and so difficult to be good that they often didn't bother. Stoicism, of which I learned at the same time, seemed wonderfully noble to me, and surely Housman was a great bard of stoicism. This still seems accurate to me, though for a long time since then I've valued Housman's artistry more than his stoicism. His language is so chaste, so thoughtfully unambiguous, that it makes the latinate effulgence of, say, Milton, seem rather pettifogging (". . . malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man," indeed!). His many poems about young men going to be soldiers express the famous sentiment, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, as movingly and, usually, thoughtfully as it could be, because for Housman, as Mr. Cornell rightly descries, patria--one's country--is the family, the farm, the parish. And in fact, many of Housman's poems express the homesickness of the country man confined to London, which never looks at all good to him.
I've grown to like Housman's classicism in manner, matter, and reference, though you don't need to catch any of it, I think, to become engrossed in his poetry. And though much has been made of the homosexual subtext of many of his poems, you don't have to believe Housman was "gay" in the present-day sense (as he wasn't, I think I can say with great assurance) to comprehend them.
Housman was not a Christian, but he was not hostile to Christianity in his verse that I can see. A Shropshire Lad XLVII, "The Carpenter's Son", is as respectful and intelligent a parody of a Christian theme as I know.
"Here the hangman stops his cart:
Now the best of friends must part.
Fare you well, for ill fare I:
Live, lads, and I will die.
"Oh, at home had I but stayed
'Prenticed to my father's trade,
Had I stuck to plane and adze,
I had not been lost, my lads.
"Then I might have built perhaps
Gallows-trees for other chaps,
Never dangled on my own,
Had I left but ill alone.
"Now, you see, they hang me high,
And the people passing by
Stop to shake their fists and curse;
So 'tis come from ill to worse.
"Here hang I, and right and left
Two poor fellows hang for theft:
All the same's the luck we prove,
Though the midmost hangs for love.
"Comrades all, that stand and gaze,
Walk henceforth in other ways;
See my neck and save your own:
Comrades all, leave ill alone.
"Make some day a decent end,
Shrewder fellows than your friend.
Fare you well, for ill fare I:
Live lads, and I will die."
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.
The two sections, More Poems and Additional Poems, of Housman's Collected Poems contain poems he did not collect and publish before his death. I presume it's late work. It is lesser stuff than that in the collections he made in his lifetime, A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems, especially in the former, on which his reputation rightly rests and from which the poems in this stream are drawn. Some More and Additional poems are bitter more than stoical, and a very few are less transparent for the reader than anything in Lad and Last. They all, however, observe the high level of craftsmanship that makes his verse so durable.
Here are three single-stanza poems that reflect bitterness unmitigated by resignation:
To stand up straight and tread the turning mill,
To lie flat and know nothing and be still,
Are the two trades of man; and which is worse
I know not, but I know that both are ill.
* * * * *
He, standing hushed, a pace or two apart,
Among the bluebells of the listless plain,
Thinks, and remembers how he cleansed his heart
And washed his hands in innocence in vain.
* * * * *
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.
And here bitterness rises to anger, even spite:
Good creatures, do you love your lives
And have you ears for sense?
Here is a knife like other knives,
That cost me eighteen pence.
I need but stick it in my heart
And down will come the sky.
And earth's foundations will depart
And all you folk will die.
Wrong-headed, one might think, but pronounced with such stark beauty.
Dr. Fleming says Housman here is being "uncharacteristically patriotic", but this is patriotism at its best; it shows what patriotism can be. As a veteran of an unpopular war, I would have welcomed something of this caliber to defend, in its nuanced way, whatever was defensible.
Being credited for fighting "for our freedom" is satisfying and good as far as it goes, since in the end, a strong military is in fact a necessity to keep other nations from entertaining aggressive ideas, but that is an abstraction; to be lauded as one of those
"Who shared the work with God"
of serving and saving the Queen is to be acknowledged as a son of the native soil; truly, "friends of ours" – of the whole people.
While claiming divine sanction for a war or cause is problematic, when the case is made out to be not merely the furthering of a geo-political interest, or even saving another people from invasion, but the saving of one's own, God-given sovereign, i.e., the embodiment of the national character, the bearer of and focus of a distinct people's traditions, a man should feel his service has something noble in it, which, though it may not be the only motive for taking up the gun in the first place, is surely its highest reward. It is this that gives the soldier hope that, though he might not save himself, his voice will still be heard in the national cri de coeur:
"And with the rest your voices ring,
Lads of the Fifty-third."
When Houseman in the final verse deftly undercuts the notion of God being on our side, he does so by means of the most respectful and grateful words a veteran can ever hope to hear, which still beautifully preserve the possibility of his service's link with Providence:
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.
For bitterness can this one be topped--always a personal favorite of mine:
The bells justle in the tower,
The hollow night amid,
And on my tongue the taste is sour
Of all I ever did.
No, it can not. And like the other late poems I've posted, it is word-perfect, in that every word used is precise and common and all the weightier for both those qualities. Yet there is a palate-cleansing quality to the poem in its entirety, as if "Yes, I'm glad I said that--and no more" were the unspoken sequel.
Thanks for bringing Housman into this forum, I was inspired to thoroughly reread--once again--the entire Collected Poems. Something I should do periodically. And, obviously, have done, without thinking of it.
Thank you to Ray Olson and Dr. Fleming for the poems and good commentary. It reminded me of how atheists like Houseman as well as men of some faith like Mr. Olson and Mr. Fleming are both instinctively drawn to the natural nobility of classical understanding. It has been said that "it is from the abundance of the heart that men speak" and Houseman is a good example of how much is personally lost with the loss of faith and how much is culturally lost from the loss of the classics. We cannot blame the loss of faith on any one human source since it is a divine gift, but we can blame ourselves for poisoning the soil from which faith once grew ---- the loss of educating in the familiar tradition of the classics.
Dr. Fleming, this is a general comment/question but it's one I've been dying to make/pose for a while, especially in the hopes that someone else with the same problem as mine is frequenting this site...
I can't get into poetry. A Homerian epic is one thing, a Shakespearean or Racinian play another, but I cannot get into collections of poems (c.f. Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal), even though I have tried. Reading through an entire poem is a tedious exercise for me. Maybe it's a problem of attention span, but I have no problem getting into a prose novel or a heavy, dense academic text, so I think it's something more particular than something like ADHD (or TV/SmartPhone-induced ADHD).
Even though I appreciate the excellent terse insights to be found in the couplet or quartet here and there and I admire the metrical structure, the rhyme and the other symmetrical patterns in quality poems, it is just tiresome - unless I have a good melody to put the words to.
Is there a cure for my affliction? I know I'm missing out on a lot by not buckling down and immersing myself, but the frustrations I've experienced trying and failing to enjoy poetry-for-poetry's sake have demotivated me in the past and I'm just a sitting duck right now.
Mr. Moses,
Based on your comments here and on the Daily Mail blog I feel like I have a lot in common with you. I will say, though, that here you have the advantage over me since you struggle with poetry but can appreciate good music. I have an equal opportunity and all-encompassing tin ear, likely caused by all of the garbage I listened to and read from ages 3 through 23.
I am in no position to give you any advise, but I can share what I have been doing to try to overcome this weakness (it's actually much the same method for me with both poetry and music). For poetry, I make myeslf read everything out loud, even if I have to do so lowly so as not to attract attention. I've also worked to start memorizing poems that I like and, with my family, do recitals every now and then. Most of all, I've tried to be patient. I will read a poem over and over throughout the day, sometimes slowly. Sometimes it helps if you can find a nice recording of a good reading. I'm not at the point where I could sit and read a whole collection of poetry. I think it's like learning to run a marathon. You have to condition yourself first. Likewise, I'm not at the point where I can sit and listen to all of Handel's Messiah. My ear and my mind get exhausted too quickly.
If I had any recommendation it would be to start with stuff you like. If you enjoy Shakespeare, then pick out a great speech from a favorite play and spend time with it. The pitfall I try to watch out for, because I am prone to it, is trying to overanalyze every word or line and decipher some secret hidden meaning. It's not a logic puzzle.
At risk of being censured again by Dr. Fleming I will confess that I have done a little reading and listening to lectures about poetry and classical music. Things about the structure of both, the history, the movements, great figures . . .etc. That doesn't take up much of my focus, though. And I will say that Dr. Fleming's advice to actually learn to play an instrument or write a poem (following rules of structure and rhythm - not the gushy teenage girl formless type of poetry) is probably the best way to learn to truly appreciate either one.
Not that I've actually followed that advice. Unless limericks count.
Thank you, Mr. Cornell, for your advice. I agree with pretty much everything you said, particularly the bit that "to actually learn to play an instrument or write a poem (following rules of structure and rhythm - not the gushy teenage girl formless type of poetry) is probably the best way to learn to truly appreciate either one."
And in all honesty, over the past six years I've actually done quite a bit of what you've prescribed in your second-to-last paragraph (though a bit more in the music department than the specifically poetry department, but in two weeks at a monastery learning Gregorian chant one re-learns the metrical forms as they apply to Latin poetry and songwriting... I have heard that poetry evolved from folk songs and may predate literacy) and the last time I really made an effort to get into a collection of poetry was with Baudelaire - in 2006. So at this point my problem might just be SmartPhone-induced ADHD after all.
I'm not at the point where I can sit and listen to all of Handel's Messiah. My ear and my mind get exhausted too quickly.
If I may return the recommendation... before I learned to like classical music I learned to like European folk music: roughly speaking, this latter represents the hard, genetic material on which any passable art music stands. Irish folk music is readily available and highly accessible and I heartily recommend all of Gaelic Storm's albums (just enough contemporary quick rhythm to keep a modern listener engaged but lots of good humor and fun folk sounds).
Also, when I got into classical music I started not with Baroque but with Romantic, Medieval (Gregorian plainsong) and Renaissance. Romantic polyphony is less grandiose than its predecessors and most interpretations of César Franck don't bombard you with complex artistic instrumental harmony. And Gregorian plainsong, apart from being simpler (because monophonic), resonates much more naturally with the American religious conscience (for Protestants as well as Catholics) than does Baroque.