Six Poets (8 page)

(
from
Last Poems)

He stood and heard the steeple

Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.

One, two, three, four, to market-place and people

It tossed them down.

Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,

He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;

And then the clock collected in the tower

Its strength, and struck.

Another of Housman's gallows verses reads:

But fetch the county kerchief

And noose me in the knot,

And I will rot.

The American lawyer Clarence Darrow amended the verse to make it read ‘Fetch the county
sheriff
/ And noose me in the knot' – and he got several murderers off by emotionally quoting the line to the jury. Housman said that it was partly due to him that Leopold and Loeb (who murdered a boy for kicks in the 1920s) escaped the gallows.

(
from
More Poems)

I did not lose my heart in summer's even,

When roses to the moonrise burst apart:

When plumes were under heel and lead was flying,

In blood and smoke and flame I lost my heart.

I lost it to a soldier and a foeman,

A chap that did not kill me, but he tried;

That took the sabre straight and took it striking

And laughed and kissed his hand to me and died.

Death in Housman is an instantaneous thing; his heroes don't hang about. ‘Shot, so quick, so clean an ending' is the general pattern. And as wars go, the Zulu Wars and the Boer War, which were Housman's wars, were pretty hygienic. Wilfred Owen, who lived and died during Housman's lifetime, told a different sort of truth about war, one which makes it difficult to regard the military element in Housman as little more than a stage setting, a useful prop. When the Great War came, and hundreds of thousands of young men died in battle, it might be thought that Housman would have been particularly affected. In fact, he appears not to have been, and this seems shocking. But poets are not statisticians; to them, one death means more than a thousand. When men are dying like flies, that is what they are dying like.

Still, life has a terrible way of imitating art, and during the war, Housman's college, Trinity, was turned into a hospital, so his daily life came to be peopled by the kind of young men he had written about, but whose endings weren't so quick or so clean. Other dons made them welcome. Housman just complained of the inconvenience. It was all a bit too close to home. The imagination was better, the landscape of the heart more real and more comfortable than the landscape of the trenches.

(
from
Last Poems)

Tell me not here, it needs not saying,

What tune the enchantress plays

In aftermaths of soft September

Or under blanching mays,

For she and I were long acquainted

And I knew all her ways.

On russet floors, by waters idle,

The pine lets fall its cone;

The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing

In leafy dells alone;

And traveller's joy beguiles in autumn

Hearts that have lost their own.

On acres of the seeded grasses

The changing burnish heaves;

Or marshalled under moons of harvest

Stand still all night the sheaves;

Or beeches strip in storms for winter

And stain the wind with leaves.

Possess, as I possessed a season,

The countries I resign,

Where over elmy plains the highway

Would mount the hills and shine,

And full of shade the pillared forest

Would murmur and be mine.

For nature, heartless, witless nature,

Will neither care nor know

What stranger's feet may find the meadow

And trespass there and go,

Nor ask amid the dews of morning

If they are mine or no.

Housman's punctiliousness extended to nature as well as to scholarship, and each spring he would note the date that the cherries blossomed in the Cambridge Backs. Some of the trees that blossom there now are trees that Housman saw planted.

(
from
A Shropshire Lad)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

Cambridge's famous poet could be seen every afternoon taking a walk by one of his regular routes, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and should any acquaintance dare to acknowledge him, they would be steadfastly ignored. At one time, the philosopher Wittgenstein had rooms on the same staircase as Housman lived (as indeed did the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt). Wittgenstein was one day taken short, knocked at Housman's door and asked to use the lavatory. Housman just looked at him, said, ‘Certainly not,' and closed the door. It's almost comic, his determination not to be liked.

And yet he enjoyed his celebrity, knowing that heads turned as he passed and saying of his fame that it was like a cushion between him and the hard ground. Of course, his admirers were not expected to approach him. Anyone who took the poems to be messages in code or flags of distress and, on the strength of them, plucked up courage to address what they took to be the real man, the author of
A Shropshire Lad
, found themselves sharply rebuffed. And why not? If he could have revealed the ‘real' man, he would hardly have written the poems.

We like to think that artists have a bad time and that this is the price they pay for being able to write their poems and/or their novels. So this seemingly dried-up husk of a man cherishing the memory of a lost love confirms some vague assumptions we have about suffering and art.

I'm not sure this is true. Housman certainly had a better time than his poems let on. He travelled a good deal, went regularly to France – courageously, for that time, by aeroplane – and was rather vain of this daredevil side to his character. He liked tempting fate, and often ran up the several flights of stairs to his room in the hope that he might have a heart attack when he got to the top. Nor was he the ascetic his appearance suggested. Liking good food, he would go on gastronomic tours of France, nosing out in unsuspected corners the remnants of great cellars. And he may have had the occasional fling there, life not quite the sexual Sahara his poems suggest. One should not be surprised if he didn't sometimes grow weary of his thralldom to what was now just a memory. The inner life has its routines and they can be every bit as tedious and irksome as those of the outer life. The grave began to seem a release from love as much as from life.