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I know we're all going to die once I feel all right
I spent almost all of the previous day with my internal soundtrack set to A.E. Housman, meaning that anyone riding shotgun with me on various errands would have heard me reciting as much as I have committed to memory of A Shropshire Lad (1896), which is generally as much as I have heard set to music, and the three-eighths of "The Oracles" that I find haunting as opposed to highly alliterative. I can't recite "Twice a week the winter thorough," but I may pettily side-eye Edith Sitwell forever for writing it off so wittily in Aspects of Modern Poetry (1934):
It is claimed by admirers of cricket and of war that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. If this may be held to be true, cricket did, on that occasion, bring a great many men to their death. But I do not think that Professor Housman has explained to us clearly enough how it is that cricket has saved men from dying. If he means us to understand that cricket, and cricket alone, has prevented men from committing suicide, then their continuation on this earth seems hardly worth while.
It's true that some of what Housman's narrators experience as pathos is legible as bathos to the reader, e.g. the plangent discovery of the last couplet of "When I was one-and-twenty." There are other poems in the collection where disappointment in love translates credibly into despair of the world; in that one it seems mostly a function of being two-and-twenty. One of the other narrators will come by in a bit and give him the only advice there is, which is far less often to put the pistol to your head than to shoulder the sky and drink your ale. Or play sports, if the routine is what gets you through the seasons day by day. I can understand Sitwell's sarcasm about the first two verses; phrases like "See the son of grief at cricket" are exactly the stupid stuff Housman has his anticipated critics deride. And then the last verse just plunges off the pitch into the appalling existential prospect—not at all sentimental or adolescent and desperately familiar—that our most stalwart institutions may be nothing more than a distraction from self-destruction, our best efforts reduced to the trivializing "mirth" which may yet be the only thing keeping us this side the grave. It isn't about cricket or football or any other human endeavor. It's about the impossibility of believing that these things will really help and keeping on with them all the same. "No harm in trying." If the narrator doesn't sound convinced by his own resolution, he's still here to make it. There's much worth while in that.
It is entirely possible that I am arguing partly with a straw man. Sitwell was known for her invective and Aspects of Modern Poetry is as much slapfight as criticism, most memorably with her contemporary enemies: "As for the interpretation of the stressing, it is sad to see Milton's great lines bobbing up and down in the sandy desert of Dr Leavis' mind with the grace of a fleet of weary camels." She did no lasting damage to Housman and I'm sure he had defenders on the spot all those almost ninety years ago. But everybody has something and cricket is no sillier than the gas fire you light instead of lying down in front of, to jump tracks to another Terence and the problem of staying alive, which is to say in trouble, for remedy of which we have poetry, whether it helps or not.
It is claimed by admirers of cricket and of war that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. If this may be held to be true, cricket did, on that occasion, bring a great many men to their death. But I do not think that Professor Housman has explained to us clearly enough how it is that cricket has saved men from dying. If he means us to understand that cricket, and cricket alone, has prevented men from committing suicide, then their continuation on this earth seems hardly worth while.
It's true that some of what Housman's narrators experience as pathos is legible as bathos to the reader, e.g. the plangent discovery of the last couplet of "When I was one-and-twenty." There are other poems in the collection where disappointment in love translates credibly into despair of the world; in that one it seems mostly a function of being two-and-twenty. One of the other narrators will come by in a bit and give him the only advice there is, which is far less often to put the pistol to your head than to shoulder the sky and drink your ale. Or play sports, if the routine is what gets you through the seasons day by day. I can understand Sitwell's sarcasm about the first two verses; phrases like "See the son of grief at cricket" are exactly the stupid stuff Housman has his anticipated critics deride. And then the last verse just plunges off the pitch into the appalling existential prospect—not at all sentimental or adolescent and desperately familiar—that our most stalwart institutions may be nothing more than a distraction from self-destruction, our best efforts reduced to the trivializing "mirth" which may yet be the only thing keeping us this side the grave. It isn't about cricket or football or any other human endeavor. It's about the impossibility of believing that these things will really help and keeping on with them all the same. "No harm in trying." If the narrator doesn't sound convinced by his own resolution, he's still here to make it. There's much worth while in that.
It is entirely possible that I am arguing partly with a straw man. Sitwell was known for her invective and Aspects of Modern Poetry is as much slapfight as criticism, most memorably with her contemporary enemies: "As for the interpretation of the stressing, it is sad to see Milton's great lines bobbing up and down in the sandy desert of Dr Leavis' mind with the grace of a fleet of weary camels." She did no lasting damage to Housman and I'm sure he had defenders on the spot all those almost ninety years ago. But everybody has something and cricket is no sillier than the gas fire you light instead of lying down in front of, to jump tracks to another Terence and the problem of staying alive, which is to say in trouble, for remedy of which we have poetry, whether it helps or not.
no subject
I appreciate the emphasis of the capitalization, because while trying not to take the philosophy of her critique personally, I also think she really is wrong about the poem, which tells the reader right out how it works.
How did you discover her? I don't remember running across her until college, when I heard Britten's Canticle III: Still falls the rain (1954).
I am reminded of Hugh Kingsmill's 'A Poem, After A.E. Housman', which I had to go look up after seeing this post. I'd remembered the final couplet ("Lads whose job is still to do / Shall whet their knives and think of you") but forgot (how? it is unforgettable) the opening couplet: "What, still alive at twenty-two, / A clean, upstanding chap like you?"
Which Housman thought was funny, which I think speaks well of him. (And he did it to Aeschylus first, so it's only fair.)
I have always assumed that if Housman hadn't had a sense of humor about himself, he wouldn't have written "Terence, this is stupid stuff" because it wouldn't have occurred to him that the depresso quotient of his poetry might need defending or even that it might have that effect on the reader at all.
no subject
Agreed. The cow, the old cow, she is dead / It sleep well, the horned head / We poor lads, 'tis our turn now / to hear such tunes as killed the cow is, I think, impossible to read without an overtone of self-mockery.
The Aeschylus parody is fabulous. :-D
no subject
I don't see how else. And the diction of "When I was one-and-twenty" is so dramatically elevated that I have never quite been able to take it straight, or feel confident that its author intended me to, no matter the insistence of its narrator. Something like "He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?" doesn't bother with pearls and rubies or endless rue; it's so blunt it shouldn't be able to pack the Platonic punch that it does and once again it's a mic drop and done.
The Aeschylus parody is fabulous.
One of my untraumatizing grad school experiences was the time we were handed the Greek translation cold and asked what we made of it.
no subject
And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
For that is very much the safest plan
I've loved this parody for decades and am just now finding out it's been returned to Greek. This is strangely satisfying. For the record, what did you all make of it?
no subject
It was sort of a delayed fuse effect, but as I recall, hilarity.
no subject
My parents had a CD of Prunella Scales doing Façade. It didn't stick at first, but then when I was... okay, per Wikipedia[*] I was probably more like 12, I was trying to be a normal teen/preteen who liked normal things, so I watched rage regularly, and the music video of Shakespear's Sister's 'I Don't Care' made me go "wait a minute, I know those lines!" and then I got really into listening to my parents' Façade CD, and they gave me Sitwell's collected works for my birthday the next year.
[* in that the music video I watched was not out yet when I was eleven, I mean]
Or, wait, my first encounter might have been one of those books of anecdotes and witty quotations that I was addicted to at the same age. Sitwell made for good anecdotes.
And he did it to Aeschylus first, so it's only fair.
True (or to his translators, anyway) and it does speak well of him, and a "suitably attired in leather boots / head of a traveller" has been stuck in my head for many years now.
no subject
Even if that isn't the actual earliest encounter rather than the book of quotations, it's a valid and terrific one.
(or to his translators, anyway)
We were told in grad school that if any of our translations ever verged on sounding like "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy," we were definitely doing it wrong.