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.
By David Selzer