The land of lost content - A. E. Housman sings the tunes that killed the cow

A. E. Housman is chronologically a poet of the 1890s, and since I have been reading some of them I took the excuse to revisit A Shropshire Lad (1896).  Any excuse is a good one, since he is a great favorite of mine.  Aesthetically, he is about as far from the elaborate, Decadent world of Dowson and Wilde as I can imagine.  The 1890s did not know what to do with Housman (although British composers liked his songful poems right away), but soon enough England learned, to its sorrow, that Housman had somehow, twenty years in advance, written a classic of war poetry, ready for when England needed it.

With rue my heart is laden
    For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
    And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
    The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
    In fields where roses fade.  (poem LIV)

Pure, melancholy lyric poetry as song-like as possible, with hints of old ballads and Robert Herrick but hardly anything to suggest composition in the 19th century, much less 1894.  I might even call Housman’s poems simple, grudgingly – the compliment, for me, is “complex” – but if the poems are so simple why are there so few like them?  Housman’s poetry is still much read but little studied.  Study seems pointless.  Memorization is rewarded, though.  Housman is easy to memorize.

Into my heart an air that kills
    From yon far country blows:
What are these blue remembered hills,
    What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
    I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
    And cannot come again.  (XL)

“Heart” is a favorite word.  So is “lad,” “man,” “young.”  Neither of the above has “grave” or “earth,” even though they are present in the first poem, veiled by metaphor.  At least the sad sack in the second poems is presumably alive.  Housman can become repetitive and morbid, sometimes comically so, especially when the 63 poems of A Shropshire Lad lead directly to Last Poems (1922) and the posthumous More Poems (1936), published much later but I believe mostly from Housman’s youth.  More young men wandering the earth or falling in love only to die.

Now hollow fires burn out to black,
    And lights are guttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
    And leave your friends and go.

Oh never fear, man, nought’s to dread,
    Look not left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
    There’s nothing but the night.  (LX)

I have included these little eight-liners simply in order to enjoy complete poems, but they rarely go over forty or fifty lines.  One that does, one of my favorites, is proof of Housman’s sense of humor about his low key excesses:

  ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ‘tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ‘tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.’  (LXII, ll. 1-10)

The poet spends the next sixty lines or so describing his method, comparing it to the taking of tiny doses of poison to build immunity for when, as is inevitable, your enemies try to assassinate you.  He also recommends beer as a cure for the ills untempered by poetry.

Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.  (ll. 17-20)

The poetry will be more help on “the dark and cloudy day.”  Housman’s poems have never seemed so bitter or poisonous to me, though, but perhaps I had been previously immunized and thus developed a taste for mournful tunes.

For them to read when they're in trouble \ And I am not - the authority of Harold Bloom

If I were to continue the theme of What I Want To Read That I Am Not Reading, what would I write about today?  Poems of the Spanish Golden Age?  Or anything from Renaissance Italy – Dante, Cellini, Machiavelli?  Machiavelli’s zippy comedy The Mandrake Root is a logical successor to all of that Aristophanes and Plautus.  Or maybe I should start a Whole New Thing – The Tale of Genji or something like that.

I’m acting like I’m dissatisfied with my actual reading, with the often thrilling Les Misérables, or the sly Barchester Towers, or the amusingly skeptical Maupassant.  No, no.  The mind wanders, that’s all.  If only I had the concentration, and the time.

Harold Bloom has a new book out – when is that not true – on exactly this theme.  Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems, an anthology of English-language poems on the theme of loss, death, aging, and sorrow.  I assume that the original editorial idea was to create something for the Consolation Market.  Whether this book is exactly that, I don’t know.  What consoles Harold Bloom may not be universal.

Having said that, the quality of the poems in the book is so extraordinary that I sometimes felt a sense of injustice.  Take the greatest poets in the language, select a single poem – I could do this.  Who could not do this?  I could even publish it – The Amateur Reader’s Favorite Poems, ed. Amateur Reader, Wuthering Expectations Press, 2011.  Please see this extraordinary post by the Caustic Cover Critic – one can actually do such things now.

The fact is, though, that even if my book would have poems as good, which it would, since picking a good poem by Keats or Housman is not so hard, it would not have the weight of Bloom’s book.  Harold Bloom has authority.  Not authority of taste, heaven help us, but real expertise based on decades of reading poetry, writing about it, teaching it.  He knows more about English poetry than almost anyone.

Bloom’s rhetoric can be pompous, pure gasbaggery, or it can be subtly wise.  Each poem in the book has a little introduction, a page or two, with bits of biography, close reading, and judgments handed down from the throne.  The book is nicely organized so that readers driven starkers by Bloom’s tone can easily ignore every word he writes and simply read the poems.  I thought Bloom was pretty humble in this book, actually.  He’s writing, implicitly, about his own death.

What was I doing for the last two days – what am I doing on Wuthering Expectations – besides asserting my own authority, however small?  How can the amateur propound on the merits of Greek literature, or the complete works of Nabokov?  Well, I read them, that’s step one.  Most people have not.  If I read them well, carefully, attentively, with reflection, I move ahead again.  We could argue about whether I have actually done that.  The evidence will be in the next step, when I write about them in some sort of evaluative or critical way.  Now I have done something that almost no one has done.  A small number of true experts, Professionals, scholars have an expertise that dwarfs mine.  So do a few amateurs who have made a more serious study of Aeschylus, Nabokov, etc.  I respect their authority, and benefit from their expertise.  Then there's me and my peers, many of us merrily blogging away.

I have wandered into more of a Why We Blog post than I had intended.  This is actually a Successful Resolution post.  I have not read all of Bloom’s book, neither all of the poems nor all of the Bloom.  It’s going back to the library.  It's hardly the kind of book that one should read through, although I kinda want to.

The title is from “They Say My Verse Is Sad” by A. E. Housman, a great favorite of mine, perhaps even a consoling poet.  Bloom writes almost nothing about it.  You'll see why.  It perhaps defeats expertise:

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.

Housman on Ruskin - a sort of malicious deliberation

A. E. Housman, from an 1877 letter, on John Ruskin as a teacher at Oxford:

This afternoon Ruskin gave us a great outburst against modern times. He had got a picture of Turner's, framed and glassed, representing Leicester and the Abbey in the distance at sunset, over a river. He read the account of Wolsey's death out of Henry VIII. Then he pointed to the picture as representing Leicester when Turner had drawn it.

Then he said, "You, if you like, may go to Leicester to see what it is like now. I never shall. But I can make a pretty good guess." Then he caught up a paintbrush. "These stepping-stones of course have been done away with, and are replaced by a be-au-ti-ful iron bridge." Then he dashed in the iron bridge on the glass of the picture. "The colour of the stream is supplied on one side by the indigo factory." Forthwith one side of the stream became indigo. "On the other side by the soap factory." Soap dashed in. "They mix in the middle — like curds," he said, working them together with a sort of malicious deliberation. "This field, over which you see the sun setting behind the abbey, is not occupied in a proper manner." Then there went a flame of scarlet across the picture, which developed itself into windows and roofs and red brick, and rushed up into a chimney. "The atmosphere is supplied — thus!"

A puff and cloud of smoke all over Turner's sky: and then the brush thrown down, and Ruskin confronting modern civilisation amidst a tempest of applause, which he always elicits now, as he has this term become immensely popular, his lectures being crowded, whereas of old he used to prophesy to empty benches.

I added the paragraphing. I could only find a print based on the Leicester Abbey watercolor. No other comment necessary.