The Land of Lost Content

Nineteen twenty-two was a good year for poetry. It saw the publication of two very different works which would prove to be of lasting popularity – A. E. Housman’s Last Poems, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I love that bizarre conjunction, Housman’s traditional, rhyming, apparently artless verse jostling for shelf space with the arch-modernist exciting and outraging the world with his wilful obscurities and cunning vulgarities. None of the doomed country lads who inhabit Housman’s poetic world were ever to ‘wash their feet in soda water’ as Eliot’s Mrs Porter and her daughter did, let alone dry their ‘combinations touched by the sun’s last rays’.

And yet, though seemingly poles apart, both men shared remarkable similarities quite apart from their penchant for initializing their first names. They had both worked for a time in dull and uncongenial occupations – Housman in the Patent Office, Eliot in a bank. They both had rather fussy and fastidious personalities, and neither could be described as easy-going or affable. Their emotional lives were unsatisfactory, and they expressed their unhappiness through their verse, Housman in his evocation of a lost rural past, Eliot in elaborate grumbles about the state of modern civilization. W. H. Auden, another initializer, wrote of Housman that he deliberately chose the ‘dry-as-dust’, and ‘dry’ is one of Eliot’s favourite words, often used to convey a sense of sterility. He was later to find some salvation through religious faith and a happy second marriage, but Housman had to content himself with a collection of rare pornography and – some allege – occasional bouts of sex tourism. I love the work of both poets, but if my ship sprang a leak and the desert island beckoned, I would grab my copy of Housman: in his poetry at least he expressed sympathy for the common man, the underdog and the chap down on his luck. As a hopeful versifier myself, Housman reassures me that you are never more than eight short lines away from writing something truly memorable:

The half-moon westers low, my love, And the wind brings up the rain; And wide apart lie we, my love, And seas between the twain. I know not if it rains, my love, In the land where you do lie; And oh, so sound you sleep, my love, You know no more than I.

There are some Housman poems that are far from essential and a few that are positively bad, but when he gets it right the results are timeless. I like to read him late at night after the television has been switched off, when silence reigns, and the world is sleeping. He makes more sense then and his bleak assessment of what life has to offer rings true like the ghostly chimes of midnight – ‘Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters/ I take my endless way’. The prevailing tone may be pessimistic and world-weary but somehow it doesn’t depress. There’s a quiet heroism and grandeur in the verse that uplifts the spirit, and the swinging lyrical lilt of such lines as ‘West and away from here to heaven’ can never leave you in gloom. One puts down a volume of Housman much as one might leave an ancient country churchyard after reading the headstones – quiet and thoughtful in a meditative way. It helps too that these are mostly poems set in the great outdoors, in a world of weather, wildflowers, open skies and moonlit heaths. We can hear the bells ringing from church spires, the noise of country fairs, the jangle of horse-teams and the song of birds. Always before us is the open road, the highway that takes Housman’s comrades off to foreign wars and oblivion. His poetic output was sparse. There were only two collections published in his lifetime – A Shropshire Lad in 1896 and the taciturnly titled Last Poems in that momentous year of 1922. Was there a hint of defiance in that latter title? Like Conan Doyle trying to rid himself of the wildly popular Sherlock Holmes with the story ‘His Last Bow’, Housman was perhaps shaking off an adoring public so he could get back to his real life’s work – academic scholarship and the detailed textual analysis of a minor classical poet called Manilius. Last Poems sold well, and when Housman was in the grave he had so often imagined, his brother Laurence trawled through his manuscripts and notebooks to bring to a grateful world More Poems in 1936 and some additional verse in a memoir the following year. These latter offerings are by no means substandard and include Housman’s angry cri de coeur at the fate of Oscar Wilde, a poem that probably could not have been published in his lifetime. It begins:

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

When I was studying literature back in the 1980s there were plenty of lectures on T. S. Eliot but none on Housman. I had to discover him for myself, prompted to do so by George Orwell’s confession in his essay ‘Inside the Whale’ that ‘In 1920, when I was about seven- teen, I probably knew the whole of the Shropshire Lad off by heart.’ I was the same age, and having been converted to poetry by the simple expedient of learning to read it out loud, was ready to try this frowned-upon poet who had fallen into critical disfavour. I looked for his works in an ill-lit antiquarian bookshop down a lane not far from campus, and there he was on the dusty shelves along with forgotten copies of Edward Marsh’s Georgian anthologies and The Complete Poems of Rupert Brooke. Having come to the city from a small market town I really missed the countryside and wandered thankfully into Housman’s landscape of trees, fields and hills. I enjoyed too his sense of drama. The imagined Shropshire of the poems, like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, isn’t really an idyll but a bracing realm of action where young men are hanged in country jails, shoot themselves through the head, or march off to fife and drum, leaving their lovers behind them. Disgrace, shame and death are constant companions in Housman’s world and there’s no religious consolation in this mortality-haunted melancholy as he has no time for ‘whatever brute and blackguard made the world’. What was the source of all this angst? According to his biographers the loss of his mother at an early age, and his unrequited love for a friend, Moses Jackson, were crucial. Norman Page, in his account of Housman’s life, notes that ‘Alfred prayed to God that his mother might be spared, but she died just the same.’ It’s certainly the case that while ‘rose-lipt maidens’ make their appearance in the poems his real sympathies are with the ‘lightfoot lads’, particularly those in uni- form who for him represent romantic figures of longing and affection:

What thoughts at heart have you and I We cannot stop to tell; But dead or living, drunk or dry, Solider, I wish you well.

In one of his most famous poems he speaks of ‘the land of lost content’ and this experience of an expulsion from Eden is one that he shared with other writers of the period. It usually occurred in childhood and might be caused by a sudden removal from warm colonial climes to a grey rainy Britain; a banishment from happy family life to the rigours of an English public school; or – as in Housman’s case – by the sudden death of a beloved parent. For him Eden was irretrievable, and the rest was disillusion. Though his merits as a poet are much debated, the days when critics looked down their noses at Housman are probably over. It’s safe to say that his recurring themes of love, death, nature and war never lose their relevance. Poetic fashions may come and go but Housman’s rare gift of lyricism, and his sadness, will always strike a chord in some human hearts.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © David Fleming 2024 Illustration by Ella Balaam