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A.E. Housman

POETRY

‘A SHROPSHIRE LAD’…

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read4.6K views

…is the first book of poetry I owned –

a breast pocket sized hardback, slightly foxing.

It was my father’s: his name neatly

in capitals on the inside cover

in indelible pencil – a Londoner,

the son of an economic migrant

and a refugee. When I was ten

my mother gave it me. I liked the first line

‘From Clee to heaven the beacon burns’,

imagining it set to music.

 

Following his death on active service, the book

was sent back with all his other things.

I never knew him. He never saw me.

He died, an ocean away, three months

after my birth. He could be my grandson now.

He touched this book. I touch it, sniff it.

Old paper smells almost aromatic

like incense, always comforting, always

intriguing. Into my forties, I

thought of him every single day.

 

The book falls open automatically

at poems 35 and 36:

 

…On the idle hill of summer,

Sleepy with the flow of streams,

Far I hear the steady drummer

Drumming like a noise in dreams…

…White in the moon the long road lies,

The moon stands blank above;

White in the moon the long road lies

That leads me from my love…

 

but this is the one I return to always:

 

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 three score 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.

 

 

Note: the poem was first published on the site in November 2017.

 

 

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POETRY

THE FASHION OF THE EARTH

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read396 views

In a letter published in The Times in May

1936 – the month after

A.E. Housman died – a former student,

Dora Pym, herself a classics teacher,

described a lecture the poet/professor

had given in 1914, one morning

in May when all of the cherry trees

of Trinity College, Cambridge seemed to bloom.

 

The subject was one of Horace’s Odes –

‘Diffugere nives…’ Housman analysed

the poem, both its sense and grammar,

with his usual erudition, wit,

and donnish sarcasm. Then, for the first time

in the two years she had been attending

his lectures, looked up at the students.

In a quite different voice, he told them

that he would like to spend the remaining

minutes of the lecture ‘considering

this ode simply as poetry’ – something

they would have previously assumed was

anathema to him. He read the piece

first in Latin, then in his own translation –

 

‘The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth…’

 

– obviously moved. ‘That,’ he said hastily

like one betraying a secret, ‘I regard

as the most beautiful poem in ancient

literature’, and hurriedly left the room.

 

While they were walking to the next lecture,

her companion, a scholar from Trinity

(who would be killed in the coming war)

said, ‘I was afraid the old fellow was going

to cry’. They thought they had seen something

not meant for them, or anyone perhaps.

 

 

 

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POETRY

HOUSMAN’S BOND SLAVE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read840 views

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…’

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

INTO MY HEART

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read838 views

In a little less than two hour’s drive from here

I could be motoring through A.E. Housman’s

‘land of lost content’. Softly playing

on the radio is George Butterworth’s

A minor Rhapsody A Shropshire Lad,

its pianissimo opening chords

evoking Housman’s ‘blue remembered hills’.

 

From his boyhood home near Bromsgrove,

the poet could see the summit of Brown Clee Hill –

above the smoke of Kidderminster

that lies in-between. The opening line

of the first poem in A Shropshire Lad

begins ‘From Clee to heaven the beacon burns’.

 

I am not sure whether it is harmonies

like Butterworth’s and Ralph Vaughan Williams’,

and cadences like those of Housman and

Edward Thomas, that conjure for me,

immediately and movingly,

a prelapsarian England in which

my ancestors had no part, a country

that exists as if the Western Front’s

criminality – which murdered both

Butterworth and Thomas – had never been,

or whether what summons such nostalgia

is merely that sense of loss I feel about

my own life’s absences.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A SHROPSHIRE LAD…

David Selzer By David Selzer8 Comments2 min read739 views

…is the first book of poetry I owned –

a breast pocket sized hardback, slightly foxing.

It was my father’s: his name neatly

in capitals on the inside cover

in indelible pencil – a Londoner,

the son of immigrants. When I was ten

my mother gave it me. I liked the first line

‘From Clee to heaven the beacon burns’,

imagining it set to music.

 

Following his death on active service, the book

was sent back with all his other things.

I never knew him. He never saw me.

He died, an ocean away, three months

after my birth. He could be my grandson now.

He touched this book. I touch it, sniff it.

Old paper smells almost aromatic

like incense, always comforting, always

intriguing. Into my forties, I

thought of him every single day.

 

The book falls open automatically

at poems 35 and 36:

 

…On the idle hill of summer, 

Sleepy with the flow of streams,

Far I hear the steady drummer 

Drumming like a noise in dreams… 

 

…White in the moon the long road lies, 

The moon stands blank above;

White in the moon the long road lies 

That leads me from my love…

 

but this is the one I return to always:

 

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 three score 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. 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ONLY ONE IN STEP

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read452 views

 

 

 

 

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

 

 

 

 

 

i

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is

somehow very ‘Thirties: lots of chaps in

the dark behind high walls; much shadow-play

with unidentifiable voices;

belated, blinding suddenness of light.

The decade’s putative worthies (who all,

by the way, seem to have been chaps) go forth

unknowingly in parallel: e.g.

Hitler in Berchtesgarten, Wittgenstein

(Adolf’s erstwhile peer from Linz) in Cambridge.

Did Wittgenstein walk with Blunt, Philby,

Burgess and Maclean as the fifth man?

Meanwhile, elsewhere at Trinity College

A.E. Housman tutored Enoch Powell: two

classicist lads from the West Midlands – and

the land of lost and wistful laddishness.

 

Our Enoch giving chase

ii

Our Enoch  – the wife’s second cousin twice

removed – although he always acted the

philosopher-king, indeed believed it,

in Parliament, in uniform, in the

groves of academe – appeared to labour,

tormented, in the dark, poor soul. Always

a solitary, he was chained to the

metaphysics of empire, protocol

and tribe: from the ‘Rivers of blood’ to ‘No

Surrender!’, preferring voluntary

exile to certain public failure. Yet,

see how, the fluent theme has become a

continuo – ‘influx’, ‘deluge’, ‘flood’, how

his acolytes have grown, like dragon’s teeth,

loquacious prisoners in Powell’s teeming,

booming cave of phantasmagoria.

 

 

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