Every true lover of poetry probably has one. Auden, Shakespeare, Larkin, Heaney, Duffy, Armitage: a poet whose work they studied at A-Level, or chanced upon in the school library one rainy afternoon as they hid there while their athletic, more aesthetically pleasing peers were busy sucking face under cover of the bike sheds or (more daringly) over the road outside the local offy. It might just have been one poem which did it, or (simpler still) that first, striking, opening line, that initial cascade of words that chime together as if to speak direct to us: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.’ ‘Love again: wanking a ten-past three’ (that’s Larkin again, but it’s one of my favourite opening lines of all time so I just had to throw it in). It could have been any poem, any line. It just caught you at the right time, in the right mood. But from that moment on, from the first time your eyes scanned that first line, or that final stanza, you were there. You’d found poetry.
For me, one man will forever take the laurels (or the blame) for being the one who utterly, unutterably and irrevocably, made me a convert to the ways of this strange thing called poetry. Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) is, for many, not an attractive figure, either as a poet or as a man: a strict bachelor (apart from several flings in Venice with comely young gondoliers, if rumours are to be believed), a repressed homosexual in just about every possible conceivable sense, scathing and acerbic towards those who he found deserving of his acid tongue, and (for some, most unacceptably of all, especially since Housman’s own verse was so popular among soldiers and is peppered with references to soldiering sorts) rather dismissive of the young men who fought and died in the First World War. That’s just the ‘man’ side of it: as a poet he was sparse, making Philip Larkin’s meagre output look positively prolific by comparison; narrow in the themes and moods he treats and addresses, most of the poems being about unhappy love affairs, love unreturned, or love curtailed by the death of a loved one. Love, very much, is a theme. But to an adolescent boy, particularly one who did hide out in the library while others were making out in the bike shed (or outside the offy, at any rate), Housman’s slim volume of Collected Poems spoke volumes. It’s been a while since I returned to the poems, and taking down my own battered and torn copy of the Collected Poems—256 pages in total, including Introduction and Indices—I had forgotten what poor shape it was in. The cover and first half-dozen pages pretty much just come away from the rest, and the sellotape that I once clumsily used to reattach them to the others has long since come unstuck. Inside, on the first ‘recto’ (ooh er) is the only inscription (to my knowledge) that I have ever been compelled to make in any of the myriad books I own: ‘Oliver Tearle, Feb. 2001’. For some reason, I thought and sought to memorialise the month and year that I acquired the poems, as if marking the entry of a loved one into my life. I suppose in many ways that’s precisely what I was doing.
But anyway, what about the poems themselves, I hear you cry? Cut the wanky reminiscing stuff, let’s hear some of this verse you loved to pore over so much as a spotty teenage twerp.
It was one poem, if I remember aright, that leapt off the page and hit me right between the eyes (as people like to say so much; I wish I could invent a better, more original metaphor than that, but right now I can’t, so that’ll have to do). Just four stanzas long, the average length for a Housman poem, it seemed to say everything it wanted to say and everything that might ever need to be said about love:
Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.
To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
‘Good-bye’, said you, ‘forget me.’
‘I will, no fear’, said I.
If here, where clover whitens
The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,
Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.
So simple, no dressing up or overly ornate language. It said what it meant, and (I now know) meant what it said. As one who was in a similar place at the time, I found the poem ‘spoke’ to me like that rarest of friends, one who says what you feel but says it in such a way as to skirt platitudes, to avoid truisms. (I can’t help recalling H. L. Mencken’s useful definition of a platitude: ‘A statement a) that everyone accepts to be true, and b) that is not true.’) Being a rather gauche, naïve seventeen year-old when I encountered this poem, I completely failed to spot the two most striking and important things concerning the poem: first, that it was written by a man to another man; and second, that the speaker was already dead. Two quite large, hefty oversights, I know, but it didn’t matter to me at the time. Something connected inside me with the poet’s words. Heck, I didn’t even know what ‘trefoiled’ meant (if I’m honest, I’m still not entirely sure.)
Later, I learned of Housman’s homosexuality and his unrequited love for a man he met at Oxford while studying Classics, an athlete named Moses Jackson, for whom AEH (as people like to refer to him) harboured a lifelong affection. It was a love so deep that, after Jackson’s death in the 1920s, Housman wrote no more poetry. When Housman learned of Jackson’s failing health, he went through a period of poetic creativity he hadn’t experienced in nearly thirty years, and hastily compiled and published his second volume of poems, which he wanted to publish before Jackson’s death, so that Jackson could read thme. The volume was titled, tellingly, Last Poems.
My passion for Housman developed during my years at university, and I even wrote the bulk of my dissertation for my English degree on his poetry. When I was nineteen or twenty I could have happily recited from memory all but about a dozen of the poems, something George Orwell claimed he could do as a young man (although, to be fair, when Orwell was a young man the posthumously published verse, collected in More Poems and Additional Poems, was yet to appear, so he had less to remember than I did). The more I read the more I realised that the criticism so often directed at AEH—that everything in his poetry was just there, everything was explicit and nothing implicit—wasn’t the whole truth. Sure, there was usually a clear message and the poetry was simple, but for me it sometimes seemed deceptively simple, with darker undercurrents even than were suggested on first reading:
Oh fair enough are sky and plain,
But I know fairer far:
Those are as beautiful again
That in the water are;
The pools and rivers wash so clean
The trees and clouds and air,
The like on earth was never seen,
And oh that I were there.
These are the thoughts I often think
As I stand gazing down
In act upon the cressy brink
To strip and dive and drown;
But in the golden-sanded brooks
And azure meres I spy
A silly lad that longs and looks
And wishes he were I.
I must say, I missed the sinister connotations of ‘drown’ the first time I read that. And the second, and the third, and probably for many readings after that. Then suddenly I saw that ‘drown’—so close to, and yet so far from, ‘down’—meant exactly what it said: drown. Not just to drench oneself in water, to escape from the world on dry land for a while, to swim; but to escape the world completely, by drowning oneself in the water. The speaker was a Narcissus figure, a male Ophelia, desiring death by water and an escape not just from the world, but from himself. The fact that it is only the sight of himself in reflection in the water that saves him seems to suggest far more than it actually says, compacting a multitude of possible readings in a very short space. (To muse upon just one, does the speaker think better of drowning himself? Or is he addressing us from the grave, as in the other poem? Only the ‘But’ suggests he walks away, but—and it’s a big but—the poem breaks off before we have a chance to discover what the lad decides on. No finality, no definitive message, no wrapping up and tying up of loose ends: it’s left to us and our own sensibilities.)
Or there is this stanza from a poem beginning ‘White in the moon the long road lies’:
Still hangs the hedge without a gust,
Still, still the shadows stay:
My feet upon the moonlit dust
Pursue the ceaseless way.
How should we read ‘Still’? And not just a ‘Still’ but three of the buggers. ‘Still hangs the hedge without a gust’: does ‘Still’ here mean ‘motionless’ or ‘yet’? It’s impossible to tell for sure, despite the ‘without a gust’ suggesting the hedge hangs ‘Still’ as in ‘motionless’. Despite that (or, if you like, still), the suggestion of ‘yet’ remains. And what about in the next line? Is good old AEH having a bit of fun with us there? ‘Still, still the shadows stay’: is ‘Still’ there repeated to emphasise this double meaning? That’s the thing though: we don’t know and are never going to know. Truth and certainty are just forever out of reach. After all, ‘moonlit dust’ is so close and yet so far from being ‘moon dust’, magic, wonder, fancy. It’s just dust on the path lit by the pale moon.
Yet despite this, there is something refreshingly simple and direct about Housman’s poetry, relatively speaking. There is none of the obscure political ranting of Auden, none of the abstruse references to Anglican prayer or mottoes for dead monks in Somerset villages that you encounter in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Housman will say how he feels, even while saying it’s better if he doesn’t say how he feels:
Ask me no more, for fear I should reply;
Others have held their tongues, and so can I;
Hundreds have died, and told no tale before:
Ask me no more, for fear I should reply –
How one was true and one was clean of stain
And one was braver than the heavens are high,
And one was fond of me: and all are slain.
Ask me no more, for fear I should reply.
There’s something special about the way that initial line comes back to us, first at the end of the first stanza and then again at the end of the poem as a whole.
Or there is this:
Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.
That long and cumbersome word, ‘Ensanguining’, works so well in describing a sunset because it immediately suggests the blood-red nature of a sunset while also ironically suggesting hope (‘sanguine’ as in optimistic about something). Ironic, of course, because of the word ‘hopeless’ that appears in that penultimate line.
The more you grow to like a poet’s words, often the more you want to know about them, about the person who wrote the words, why they wrote them. One paragraph of writing told me more about Housman’s personality than anything else outside of his poetry, but it was a paragraph written by someone else, namely T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia, no less):
There was my craving to be liked—so strong and nervous that never could I open myself friendly to another. The terror of failure in an effort so important made me shrink from trying; besides, there was the standard; for intimacy seemed shameful unless the other could make the perfect reply, in the same language, after the same method, for the same reasons.
These words come from Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In the margin of his copy, next to these words, Housman wrote simply, ‘This is me.’
Much more could I write on the joys of AEH, but it would all amount to the same thing, more or less: sentimental reflections on why the poetry means so much to me. It’s one reason why I haven’t written professionally on his poetry since my dissertation, five years ago. Somehow it would feel like a betrayal, a transgression of something deeply private and personal. But to some of us he can mean far more than Shakespeare, and we carry him around wherever we go. Occasionally a line might just drop into our heads as we’re going about our daily business (I can’t watch the sun set without recalling the above lines, for instance), or we’ll be solitarily reflecting upon life and the world and suddenly feel an overwhelming desire to reach for the Collected Poems again and flick through it, opening the floodgates of memory. There really is a wonderful simplicity to Housman, my few niggles aside. It’s there for everyone to enjoy, if they have the inclination. As he put it himself so well:
They say my verse is sad: no wonder;
Its narrow measure spans
Tears of eternity, and sorrow,
Not mine, but man’s.
This is for all ill-treated fellows
Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they’re in trouble
And I am not.
Fellows and fillies, lads and lasses, whether from Shropshire or otherwise: people all over the world can read Housman and find something they like. Go and try some. You might like it. And be sure to let me know what you think.
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