A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  A SHROPSHIRE LAD AND OTHER POEMS

  A. E. HOUSMAN was born in 1859, the eldest son of a Worcestershire solicitor. He was educated at Bromsgrove School and won a scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford. He gained first-class honours in Classical Moderations, his first public examination at Oxford, but then failed in Greats, the Final School, and so left Oxford without a degree. From 1882 he worked for ten years as a clerk in Her Majesty’s Patent Office, proving himself by the publications of his leisure hours a superb scholar in Latin and Greek. In 1892 he was appointed Professor of Latin at University College, London. He was to publish editions of Manilius (1903–30), Juvenal (1905) and Lucan (1926), as well as magisterial papers on a range of classical authors, with the focus particularly on questions of principle, fact and tact within textual scholarship. He became Professor of Latin at Cambridge in 1911 and died there in 1936.

  His scholarship drew admiration and fear; his poetry, love and fame. He published his first book of poems, A Shropshire Lad, in 1896 and followed it only with Last Poems in 1922. Fortunately his brother, Laurence Housman, permitted the posthumous publication of More Poems and Additional Poems. Three years before Housman died he gave delight and offence with his vivid, lucid lecture The Name and Nature of Poetry. He declined honours, including the Order of Merit.

  ARCHIE BURNETT is Co-director of the Editorial Institute and Professor of English at Boston University. His scholarly editions of the poems and the letters of A. E. Housman have been published by Oxford University Press, and he is currently preparing a complete edition, with commentary, of the poems of Philip Larkin for Faber.

  NICK LAIRD was born in 1975 in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He was a scholar at Cambridge University and spent a year at Harvard as a visiting fellow. He also worked for several years as a litigator and arbitration lawyer in London and Warsaw. The author of the poetry collections To a Fault and On Purpose, he has received several prestigious awards for both poetry and fiction, including the 2005 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award. His first novel, Utterly Monkey, won the Betty Trask Prize for Best First Novel and was shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His second novel, Glover’s Mistake, was published in 2009.

  A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems

  The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman

  Edited by ARCHIE BURNETT

  with an Introduction by NICK LAIRD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published as The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman 1939

  First published in Penguin Books 1956

  This revised edition published in Penguin Classics 2010

  Introduction copyright © Nick Laird, 2010

  Text and Notes copyright © Archie Burnett, 2010

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editors has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-91915-7

  Contents

  Introduction by Nick Laird

  A SHROPSHIRE LAD

  LAST POEMS

  MORE POEMS

  ADDITIONAL POEMS

  TRANSLATIONS

  Appendix: The Name and Nature of Poetry

  Notes on the Text

  Index of First Lines

  Index of Titled Poems

  Introduction

  Poetry tends to consume its practitioners, and they end up teaching it (Robert Frost), reviewing it (Edward Thomas) or even editing and publishing it (T. S. Eliot). A. E. Housman was different in kind: he was a Classics scholar first (by the time of his death, widely considered to be the finest of his time) and a poet second, and then only sporadically. His one public lecture on poetry, though, given in Cambridge in 1933 when he was seventy-four, shows a mind that knew what it demanded from the art. Disliking showiness and too obvious artifice, he wanted poetry free from circumlocution and synthetic diction, and was as scathing about Dryden and Pope as about his rival scholars’ confused conjectures. He thought the years between Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) the great historical period of English ‘sham poetry’. His own credo was that poetry should be direct, even if that put it in danger of collapsing into sentimentality or doggerel, and he believed entirely in the affective strength of the bare lyric. He was defending his own writing when, in that public lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry (reproduced as an appendix in this edition), he sided with the weakest of rickety lyrics against the sophistications and ironies of the mock-heroic age:

  ‘It is surely superfluous’ says Johnson ‘to answer the question that has once been asked, whether Pope was a poet, otherwise than by asking in return, if Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?’ It is to be found, Dr Johnson, in Dr Watts.

  Soft and easy is thy cradle;

  Coarse and hard thy Saviour lay,

  When his birthplace was a stable

  And his softest bed was hay.

  That simple verse, bad rhyme and all, is poetry beyond Pope.1

  Alfred Edward Housman was born to a High Church Anglican family in 1859 in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire (the birthplace, seventy-three years later, of the poet Geoffrey Hill). The eldest of seven children, his mother died when he was twelve, and in 1877 he won an annual scholarship of £100 and went up to St John’s College, Oxford, to read Classics. There he roomed with Moses Jackson, a gifted athlete and science student, and a heterosexual, whom he fell irreparably in love with.

  Although a brilliant scholar, Housman’s all-consuming interest in the Roman poet Propertius led him to neglect the other set topics in his finals and, humiliatingly, he left Oxford without even a pass degree. In 1882 he sat his civil service exams and secured a job in the Patent Office where Jackson worked. Housman then moved in with Jackson and his brother Adalbert in Bayswater. In 1887 Jackson went to India, coming back soon after to be married, though Housman was kept in the dark about the nuptials until the newly-weds had returned to India.

  While working in the Patent Office Housman devoted his evenings to studying Latin and Greek poets in the British Museum, determined to prove that the disaster of his final exams was an aberration. The articles he published analysing classical texts (including a celebrated piece on Aeschy
lus’ Agamemnon) were self-evidently the work of a brilliant scholar, and in 1892 he was appointed to the chair of Latin at University College London. In 1911 he moved to Cambridge to take up the Professorship of Latin at Trinity College.

  Jackson died in 1923, and critical studies of Housman suggest that his two bursts of poetic activity were both occasioned by the loss of Jackson – the first (A Shropshire Lad) when Jackson left for India, and the second (Last Poems) when he learned of Jackson’s illness. His own wry description of how he wrote doesn’t quite overturn that notion, and indeed the tone seems to mock and disguise, consciously or not, the heart of the impulse, that ‘sudden and unaccountable emotion’:

  I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting. If only that you may know what to avoid, I will give some account of the process.

  Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon – beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life – I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of.2

  Compared, say, to his near contemporaries Frost or Yeats or Eliot, the poet Housman is a gifted amateur. His small output sticks almost exclusively to the same template throughout, i.e. strict rhyming ballad forms. The work therefore, like Heine’s, whose songs he admired, lends itself to musical accompaniment and Vaughan Williams and Samuel Barber, among others, have set Housman poems to music.

  It’s not hard to see the tributaries that flow into his poetry – English and Scottish folk ballads (with all their soldiers and rural murders), Sir Walter Scott’s jaunty rhythms, biblical echoes (‘world without end’, ‘Be still, my soul, be still’, ‘If it chance your eye offend you’), Shakespeare (‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’) and also Shakespeare’s contemporary Samuel Daniel. (Housman recommended that ‘a promising young poetaster’ should memorize the first stanza of Daniel’s ‘Ulysses and the Siren’ ‘not necessarily as a pattern to set before him, but as a touchstone to keep at his side’.) An acknowledged influence was also the simple (not simplistic) lyrics of Blake, who ‘gives us poetry neat, or adulterated with so little meaning that nothing except poetic emotion is perceived and matters’.

  Much has been made of how Housman embodied two opposing systems: a classical dry rigour, and a romantic belief that poetry lived only in emotion. (He claimed that, ‘Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not.’) In a Paris Review interview John Berryman – who never met Housman – states

  Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvelous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar. And I’m about equally interested in those two activities. In him they are perfectly distinct. You are dealing with an absolute schizophrenic.3

  This strikes me as a false division, overlooking the fact that he was a scholar of poetic texts; both his interests dealt with word-choices. Presumably one of the reasons he engaged his intellect so strenuously with the writings of Juvenal, Aeschylus, Horace and others, was that he connected with the work on an emotional level, and his famously tart corrections to academics he felt were traducing or misjudging those texts came from a man defending his loved ones. His scholarly articles weren’t on architecture or crop rotation. And though he was happy to argue about textual corruption or conjecture, about chronology and etymology, Housman spoke of poetry as sacred, as if it passed all human understanding:

  Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connexion with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: ‘A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up.’ Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, ‘everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.’4

  Propertius’ elegies for Cynthia, the fascination of which had caused the Oxford student to fail his finals, combined his two main interests – death and love – which in Housman is always malformed or forbidden or unrequited. In his own poems, Eros and Thanatos battled and, since Eros couldn’t win (the instinct to love being stifled by society and circumstance), Thanatos was the sole conqueror and consolation. Nearly all the poems deal with death, whether viewing it with regret or love or relief or fear.

  Housman believed in the poem as a kind of Wordsworthian emotional by-product:

  The production of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a passive and involuntary process; and if I were obliged, not to define poetry, but to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster.5

  His interest in words appears subservient to the demands of emotion, and the strictures of the chosen form. Though his work has, occasionally, some fine compound adjectives – ‘twelve-winded sky’, ‘sky-pavilioned land’, ‘star-defeated sighs’ – he tended to the plainest language, using and reusing simple phrases and monosyllabic words that allowed the possibilities of heavy rhyme; ‘long’, ‘cold’, ‘grave’ are favourites for him. And even in that short list you see the sensibility shaping the work. Like Webster, Housman was much possessed by death.

  The poems often sound like someone talking to himself – full of imperatives, (‘wake’, ‘listen’) and remonstrations (‘I waste my time in talking’). The short lyrics and narratives are usually internal, for the self alone, and when the speaker tries to communicate outwards they often hint at deeper secrets that even the speaker cannot or won’t articulate: ‘I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,/ Never ask me whose’; ‘Gaze not in my eyes’; ‘Ask me no more, for fear I should reply.’ The traditions of the forms Housman used (the ballad and all its elliptic vagueness) suited his own need for opacity.

  But he also wrote with longing about a kind of relaxed, carefree masculinity which compelled him, even as it remained foreign to his sensibility. Housman is the melancholy outsider, the watcher of ‘the moving pageant’ filing ‘warm and breathing through the street’, a caretaker of the ‘house of dust’, not one of the ‘careless people / That call their souls their own’. In the songs about football, ploughing, girls, about ‘lads’, in the celebrations of a kind of natural existence, there’s a hint of Walt Whitman who – it is not coincidence – shared Housman’s sexuality, and the concomitant restriction on what could be said:

  The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,

  There’s men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold …

  I wish one could know them …6

  But if in Whitman the keynote is celebratory, Housman’s tone is much darker. These are modern poems, in impulse if not in execution, lacking the solace of religion, and there is something wonderfully subversive in how he writes coded homosexual love poems in a militaristic rhythm.

  The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread,

  And out we troop to see:

  A single redcoat turns his head,

  He turns an
d looks at me.

  The speaker and the solder exchange eye contact:

  What thoughts at heart have you and I

  We cannot stop to tell;

  But dead or living, drunk or dry,

  Soldier, I wish you well.7

  No one could accuse him of being faultless though. There are patchy moments of melodrama, high camp, gaucheness, inadvertent humour. A Shropshire Lad (self-published in 1896) was originally called ‘The Poems of Terence Hearsay’, and in one part Terence hears the confession of another farmboy (‘look your last at me’) who has killed his own brother:

  And Maurice amongst the hay lies still

  And my knife is in his side.

  Housman’s imagining of the monologue, as the murderer takes his leave, is meant to show something of pastoral decency, it seems, but blunders into awkward comedy, reminiscent of Rupert Brooke’s crashing lines (‘And stands the clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?’).

  ‘I wish you strength to bring you pride,

  And a love to keep you clean,

  And I wish you luck, come Lammastide,

  At racing on the green.

  ‘Long for me the rick will wait,

  And long will wait the fold,

  And long will stand the empty plate,

  And dinner will be cold’.8

  I’ve killed my brother. And dinner will be cold. It is like the bathetic closing note of the Dr Watts’s lines Housman admired: here is the saviour in his stable, ‘And his bed of softest hay.’

  Still, the spare lyrics have their chanting atavistic charm, and A Shropshire Lad went on to become one of the most popular books of poetry in England in the early twentieth century. These poems of loss and longing, of lovers and friends separated by external forces, of fate and heartache and sudden death, resonated with a nation suffering the First World War and its attendant hardships. The book, published in 1896, seems to actually foresee the war and its effects, with all its talk of dead lads and soldiers and empty towns. And when he gets it right his ear is persuasive. In the line quoted earlier (‘The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair’) there is a whole battery of acoustic effects being engaged, and sometimes the work can slide in a few lines from vaguely comedic speechifying to something obdurately real as nightmare: