Six Poets (9 page)

(
from
More Poems)

Crossing alone the nighted ferry

With the one coin for fee,

Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,

Count you to find? Not me.

The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,

The true, sick-hearted slave,

Expect him not in the just city

And free land of the grave.

The next poem is Housman at his very best: clear-eyed, unsentimental, having no truck with God or conventional morality and, in a poem that is full of echoes of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, having no patience with either.

(
from
Last Poems)

These, in the day when heaven was falling,

The hour when earth's foundations fled,

Followed their mercenary calling

And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

They stood, and earth's foundations stay;

What God abandoned, these defended,

And saved the sum of things for pay.

There are in all of us the remnants of another morality, a persistent rival to Christian and conventional ethics, in which honour, loyalty and pride outweigh modesty and self-denial. It's the morality that prevails in gangster movies and in the western, and the point of Housman's poem is immediately familiar if we set it in the American West and substitute for the mercenaries the reluctant gunslinger and the town lecher. Despised by the respectable (but cowardly) churchgoing homesteaders, these two social outcasts get together with the drunken doctor and shoot it out with the cattle gang who are holding the town to ransom. It is morality far from its official haunts, an ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries' but also
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
.

While Housman's poems are autobiographical, his landscapes are the landscapes of the heart. Although the ‘blue remembered hills' of the next poem can be identified with the Malverns, they are symbols of a lost time rather than a lost place.

(
from
A Shropshire Lad)

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those 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.

Once there had been another Housman: good at parody and light verse; even fun, as Lewis Carroll had been fun. Occasionally this surfaces, if rather mordantly, in the poems. In ‘Is my team ploughing', Housman has a sour joke at the expense of the departed lover.

(
from
A Shropshire Lad)

‘Is my team ploughing,

That I was used to drive

And hear the harness jingle

When I was man alive?'

Ay, the horses trample,

The harness jingles now;

No change though you lie under

The land you used to plough.

‘Is football playing

Along the river shore,

With lads to chase the leather,

Now I stand up no more?'

Ay, the ball is flying,

The lads play heart and soul;

The goal stands up, the keeper

Stands up to keep the goal.

‘Is my girl happy,

That I thought hard to leave,

And has she tired of weeping

As she lies down at eve?'

Ay, she lies down lightly,

She lies not down to weep:

Your girl is well contented.

Be still, my lad, and sleep.

‘Is my friend hearty,

Now I am thin and pine,

And has he found to sleep in

A better bed than mine?'

Yes, lad, I lie easy,

I lie as lads would choose;

I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,

Never ask me whose.

If you don't conform in one thing, you must conform in all the others – and Housman had conformed. And yet this drab little man – who still affected the Norfolk jacket and elastic-sided boots and little cap he had worn when he was young – was a pervert, an iconoclast and a blasphemer. Ruthless as an editor, he was pitiless as a critic and contemptuous of all honour and praise. He refused the Order of Merit, and of a colleague who said of him that he was the greatest living Latin scholar, Housman said, ‘Well, if I were, he would not know it.' That was one of his voices. But we end with the other.

(
from
Last Poems)

When summer's end is nighing

And skies at evening cloud,

I muse on change and fortune

And all the feats I vowed

When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset

Would lose the slanted ray,

And I would climb the beacon

That looked to Wales away

And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven

The hues of evening died;

Night welled through lane and hollow

And hushed the countryside,

But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall

In converse high would stand,

Late, till the west was ashen

And darkness hard at hand,

And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy

The lessening day might close,

But air of other summers

Breathed from beyond the snows,

And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not

And come no more anew;

And all the years and seasons

That ever can ensue

Must now be worse and few.

So here's an end of roaming

On eves when autumn nighs:

The ear too fondly listens

For summer's parting sighs,

And then the heart replies.