Six Poets (6 page)

(
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
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.

(
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 book 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.

(
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,