POETRY

In ‘My Antonia’, Willa Cather’s third

novel about European pioneers

on the Great Plains, and first published in

1918, Antonia’s father,

failing at farming the prairie, longing

for his old life as a musician

in Catholic Bohemia, kills himself.

Denied his burial on consecrated ground

his wife, a bitter woman, has him interred

at the south west corner of their small plot of land,

where two tracks meet – like the old country,

where suicides were buried at a cross roads.

In time, what was unfenced wilderness marked

by stakes, and ways marked by wagon wheels, becomes

ordered farmland and levelled roads. Fenced now,

enclosed with the last of the red prairie grass,

the grave remains untouched. The roads curve round it.

 

***

 

Shortly after the publication

of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ in 1896,

Willa Cather became, as she put it,

‘Housman’s bond slave, mentally’. Whenever,

wherever she could, she promoted the work

in the magazines she edited.

She acknowledged that his poetry

made its way freely throughout her own work.

 

In 1902 she went on a tour

of Europe with a friend. First stop, more or less,

was the county of Shropshire. They visited

most of the places mentioned in the poems –

like Ludlow, Wenlock Edge, the Wrekin, and Clee –

sometimes more than once, but could find no trace

of Housman, or anyone who had ever

heard of him. The single copy of the book

in Shrewsbury’s public library was uncut.

 

Eventually, she got Housman’s address:

a boarding house in Pinner near London.

Willa went with two friends. Imagine three young,

outward-going women, passionately

convinced that Housman had written the only

verse in English from the previous decade

that would last, that it was as remarkable

technically as it was in the ‘truth

of its sentiment’. Imagine Housman,

middle-aged, lonely, forever carrying

a secret close to the surface of his heart:

his unrequited love for another man.

 

Later, Cather, in a letter to a friend,

described Housman – ‘as the most gaunt and grey

and embittered individual I know’.

She went on to say, ‘The poor man’s shoes and cuffs

and the state of the carpet in his little

hole of a study gave me a fit

of dark depression’. After they had left,

she had wept on the pavement outside the house.

 

***

 

‘…the grave, with its tall red grass that was never

mowed, was like a little island; and at

twilight, under a new moon or the clear

evening star, the dusty roads used to look

like soft grey rivers flowing past it…’