A. E. Housman (1859–1936)

My expectations for this poem cycle were confounded. I'd got it into my head that A Shropshire Lad was a rural idyll about bucolic farm boys, milk maids and nostalgic reveries about "blue remembered hills". As there is practically none of that ("blue remembered hills" notwithstanding), I'd obviously constructed this false image myself based on nothing more than the title of the collection.

Now, that's a bit of a shame as I was in the mood for (had a need for, in fact) a bit of idylic escapism show more to lift my mood. What Housman serves up instead is a series of poems of which the majority deal with death, sometimes by way of poetical allusion (autumnal trees shedding leaves, that sort of thing), though often directly stated. War is present in some poems, but mostly death simply stalks the countryside, or the city-bound country boy pining for his home fields. A few of the poems pay with the idea of the dead visiting the living, only to find their sweetheart in the arms of their best friend. These melancholy musings are not without their charm, though not exactly what I had in mind as a tonic (fortunately, Keats's remedy of getting out into nature was available to me). However, Housman goes rather further in a couple of poems, encouraging his 'lad' to die by suicide, and in one poem worthy of Poe, his 'lad' (there must be several of them, and presumably Shropshire must have been rather depopulated of young men if Housman is to be taken literally) actually cuts his own throat while on a date with his girlfriend.

Some of the poems remind me of Khayyám-FitzGerald's preoccupation with mortality and the transience of life, and with the consolations of alcohol. The are some quatrains in Housman's collection but, as far as my amateur reading can tell, no deliberate imitation of the Rubáiyát.

First published in 1896, I wonder whether the late Victorian morbid (from a modern perspective) relationship with death, and their often melodramatic sentimentality feeds into Housman's rather dark vision of life's ephemeral nature. How much was England and the Empire overshadowed by the growing inevitability of the death of the Old Queen? The impending death of the seemingly ever-present and eternal Victoria signalling the decease of a way of life, a break in cultural continuity, the end of days?

Overall, an uneven (but enjoyable) collection, I think, though highly praised by J.R.R. Tolkien, who's probably a better judge than I. I'll read the poems again when I'm in a brighter mood and see whether the poems which aren't about death and shagging your dead mate's girlfriend make more of an impression on me. show less

A Shropshire lad (1896) is one of the most celebrated collections of poems in English. Housman brings together themes of evanescent youth, beautiful English rural scenery, and untimely sudden death, hitting many of the same buttons as the German romantic poets of a hundred years earlier, and he does it in a deceptively simple, almost folkloric style that draws the reader straight into the world of the poems. The generally morbid subject-matter is lightened by an occasional touch of earthy show more humour, even self-mockery. In the penultimate poem, "Terence, this is stupid stuff", the poet debates with a friend the relative merits of poetry and beer:

Oh, many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse

- the poet concedes the point, but argues that poetry is better at preparing you for life's miseries than beer is!

When you read these poems for the first time, you'll probably be surprised how many of their lines and phrases have entered the language. They are not poems of the sort you have to struggle through on the page, untangling dense webs of allusions, but rather poems that you want to learn by heart, to read aloud, to sing (all the great and good of 20th century English music have had a go at them at various times...).

Many of the poems refer to the countryside of the Shropshire hills. It's an area where I used to go walking "when I was one-and-twenty" myself: when you stand on the Long Mynd or the Wrekin, at that age, it's difficult to resist the urge to declaim a bit of Housman. The poems seem to fit perfectly to the landscape, but famously, Housman didn't know that area at all well when he wrote the poems: he was a Worcestershire lad himself, and the poems were mostly written in London. He seems to have picked Shropshire because he liked the rhythm of the placenames and thought it would fit with the romantic pastoral idea of Englishness he was trying to convey. Maybe "Worcestershire" is too firmly attached to "Lea and Perrins" in the popular imagination...

Housman has become something of a gay icon, of course, and (as the title implies) the subjects of these poems are mostly somewhat idealised young men, usually farm-workers and soldiers. Women appear only peripherally, as mothers or sweethearts. Quite a few of the poems are addressed by one young man to another, often from the grave, but they deal (explicitly, at least) with friendship, rather than love, between men. Obviously, these are poems that resonate with gay readers, but I think just about anyone would get a good deal of pleasure from them.

[Another of those books with lots of copies on LT that no-one has bothered to review so far, presumably because it is so well-known] show less

8/2012 I come to Housman when I'm hollow, when I'm lost, when I'm confused. I come here when I need to come here, and he takes me in, he comforts me with snark, with acute observation, with hilarity and bottomless woe. There's nobody, nobody at all like Housman. I have entire swaths of this by heart, and generally read a poem or two at need. Today I read it cover to cover and was, once again, entirely blown away.


2010: What's to say of Housman? His words are like strange wine that changes show more one utterly once imbibed.

"...that grace, that manhood gone..." show less

I was first introduced to the exquisite poetry of A.E. Housman in my grade ten English class (where we covered British literature from Beowulf to the early 20th century). I started to appreciate Housman then, but I really, really started to love his poetry when I listened to George Butterworth's lovely and evocative song-cycle rendition of A Shropshire Lad and realisesd that Housman's poems are not just meant to be read, but really and truly are meant to be sung, to be listened to as musical show more offerings (offerings showing joy, simplicity, but also the anguish of lost love, of growing up, and of destructive, manipulative war, that has the horrific power to destroy whole bastions of young men). show less