A.E. Housman: bit of a ratbag, but a terrific poet

                       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.

Wenlock Edge is a massive, 15-mile, tree-topped limestone escarpment slanting across Shropshire, and the Wrekin is a nearby hill. The above quatrain forms the opening of A.E. Housman’s poem, “On Wenlock Edge”, from his perennially popular collection of early poems, A Shropshire Lad, first published in 1896. Last week, I got to recite “On Wenlock Edge” on Wenlock Edge – as, I suspect many thousands of visitors have done before me. (Fortunately, only my immediate family were in attendance.) 

If it hadn’t been for Housman’s poems, I doubt if I would have visited Shropshire at all. I’m delighted I did. As I stood outside our remote rented cottage, high on a hillside, enjoying seemingly endless views of a dreamlike England (and quite a chunk of Wales) I realised it would be impossible to see it other than through the prism of this seemingly stuffy Edwardian Classics scholar’s emotionally-charged work. No bad thing either.

I sort of sidled up to Housman’s poetry through Vaughan Williams’s celebrated 1909 musical setting of six of the poems, George Butterworth’s piercingly beautiful tone poem, A Shropshire Lad, and the parody which begins, “What, still alive at 22/A fine upstanding lad like you?” Before that, I was, of course, familiar with phrases such as “blue remembered hills” and “the land of lost content”, but I couldn’t have identified their source (ignorant sod, I know.)

A.E. Housman, the eldest of seven children, grew up in Worcestershire. His father was a somewhat dilatory local solicitor whose determination to pursue the life of a country gentleman and live in a Very Large House meant he was often in debt and, legally, sailed very close to the wind on a number of occasions. Housman’s beloved mother died on his twelfth birthday, his father increasingly took to drink, and Housman and his brothers could only continue to attend the very good local school thanks to scholarships. 

Housman won another scholarship to St. John’s, Oxford, but squandered the early chance of a distinguished academic career by arrogantly refusing to stick to the “Greats” curriculum. Having surprisingly failed his finals, he had to slink back, humiliatingly, and sit a so-called “Pass” exam.

At Oxford, he fell in love with a fellow-undergraduate, Moses Jackson, who went to work at the Patents Office in London after graduating, and got Housman a humbler, poorly paid job as a clerk there. During his twenties, Housman seems to have declared his feelings for Jackson (they were sharing a flat at the time) - and was evidently rebuffed:

                                 Because I liked you better

                                 Than suits a man to say,

                                 It irked you and I promised

                                To throw the thought away.

Although they never regained their former intimacy (strictly non-physical – Jackson was a decidedly heterosexual rowing blue), and even though Jackson lived much of the rest of his life abroad – returning to England to get married, and not telling Housman about it until he and his bride had sailed - he remained the unattainable love of Housman’s life.

Jackson’s rejection of his friend’s advances (what exactly happened is a mystery) seems to have resulted in Housman returning to his classical studies during evenings at the British Museum, and in his writing the poems that eventually appeared in A Shropshire Lad. A large number of brilliant scholarly articles written in his spare time led to him being offered the Chair of Latin at University College, London in 1892, when he was 33 – which provided an escape from both the grinding tedium of life as a petty civil servant, and the stigma of academic failure. Four years’ later, A Shropshire Lad was published, to mild acclaim: it took the First World War and post-war nostalgia for a vanished world to really seal its popularity. (Many soldiers carried a copy, and Housman looked forward to the day when, Bible-like, it would save a Tommy’s life by stopping a German bullet.)

For many years, Housman refused to accept any royalties for the work, on the grounds that poetry wasn’t his trade, and he tended to rudely rebuff people who tried to discuss the poems with him. He refused to allow individual poems to appear in anthologies, but was happy to accede to request to set his work to music.

Housman’s demeanour was that of a rather unpleasant type of “cold fish” Englishman – we’ve all met them, and rather wish we hadn’t: he was prickly, uncommunicative, sarcastic, scathing, solitary, awkward and arrogant (surprised he didn’t pursue  a career in the Foreign Office). He had his pleasures – good wine and fancy food, mild pornography, French male prostitutes, gondoliers, country walks and (bizarrely) flying.  Several acquaintances claimed he could be a delightful companion, but this smacks of all that nonsense about Gordon Brown really being a warm and lovable human being. He was a raving Old School Tory, very patriotic (once, unbidden, he sent a sizable cheque to the Treasury to help pay for the First World War), and was ever so keen on young soldiers (and not just for the obvious reason – he admired and was deeply affected by their bravery and capacity for sacrifice, as several of his Boer War poems attest.)

As I read Richard Perceval Graves’s 1979 biography, A.E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (OUP, 1979), and reread A Shropshire Lad, I found myself wishing that I liked Housman more as a person – but in the end, what does it matter? The nicest people in the world write the crappiest poetry, and, while Housman could produce occasional infelicities – “The goal stands up, the keeper/Stands up to keep the goal”!! Huh? – his poetry is rarely less than memorable, and often utterly unforgettable. Some examples:

A dead boy asks his living friend about his life now and receives this chilling response:

                            Yes, lad, I lie easy,    

                            I lie as lads would choose;    

                            I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,    

                            Never ask me whose.

A young man used to lie on Bredon Hill with his sweetheart on sunny Sundays and ignore the summoning bells below. She dies - “And so to church went she/And would not wait for me”. Now, he hears the bells once more:

                            The bells they sound on Bredon

                            And still the steeples hum.

                            `Come all to church, good people,' --

                            Oh, noisy bells, be dumb;

                            I hear you, I will come.

He excels at hopeless misery:

                            Here by the labouring highway

                            With empty hands I stroll:

                            Sea-deep, till doomsday morning,

                            Lie lost my heart and soul.

A young shepherd keeps a vigil for his friend, who is due to be hanged in the morning:

                            So here I'll watch the night and wait

                            To see the morning shine,

                            When he will hear the stroke of eight

                            And not the stroke of nine

There are many poignant celebrations of Nature:

                            About the woodland I will go

                            To see the cheery hung with snow

And, despite a horrible inversion in the line first:

                            And there's the windflower chilly

                            With all the winds at play,

                            And there's the Lenten lily

                            That has not long to stay

                            And dies on Easter day.

I’ll finish with the last four verses of my personal favourite, “On Wenlock Edge”:

                            'Twould blow like this through holt and hange

                            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.

It’s generally agreed that Housman isn’t a first-rate poet: he’s generally placed at the front rank of lesser geniuses. Kingsley Amis – and many other literary types – cite him as a “guilty pleasure”. I think that assessment is fair – he isn’t a Yeats or a Wordsworth. In some ways the poetry is too easy – the meaning is instantly graspable, the lyric effects often a little too obvious. Housman was convinced poetry derived from the gut and the spine rather than the head, and that attitude is obvious throughout his work: many of the poems in A Shropshire Lad poured out of him in a few creatively frenzied months, and they tend to wash over readers in the same way.

But they’re beautiful and memorable and poignant, drenched with nostalgic longing for a more innocent, more authentic, more immediate past.

Oddly, when he began writing the poems, he hadn’t even visited Shropshire.