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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.
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Now I want to see a production of "The Invention of Love."
P.
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After some research, in this case I think she means it. She seems to find Housman's poetry fundamentally at odds in form and theme: "Ploughboys never moved so elegantly, men about to be hanged never expressed their sentiments with such neatness; the broken-hearted groan or they whisper, but they do not confine their outpourings to the brevity of such epigrammatic quatrains as these," which feels to me like criticizing the characters in a musical for singing and also confuses me, since she loved Gerard Manley Hopkins and a less mimetic manner of ordering words in modern English is hard to find without lighting out for Dada. But she also has the Anthony Lane problem for me in that she can be so effectively clever that it is hard to tell if she really disdains something or if she just can't resist the zinger, although in the case of Leavis she means it and more.
But the poem itself is one of the shorter and more effective evocations I've seen of the feeling of having to just get up and do something, whether it helps or not, because what is the alternative? So yeah, understandable argument-- my reaction to her is an annoyed growl.
You growl very well and I love you.
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It's not his only mode and it may not account for the phenomenon in your case, but he is capable of effecting incredible devastation while sounding as though he is saying nothing very much out of the ordinary at all. It's how you get poems like "Now hollow fires burn out to black," whose last lines are phrased as though they should encourage and land like cosmic horror and the whole thing is so matter-of-factly rendered that it can take the reader a minute to realize that the entire world has been cut out from under their feet. "The half-moon westers low, my love" is less starkly existential, more imaginative and wistful, but there's still no getting away from the end of it, where the thing that binds the lovers is what they don't know and only for one of them does it arise from lying awake like Sappho PMG fr. adesp. 976. They are gut-punches and they don't tip their hand until it's too late to get out of the poem. It just looked like it was about cricket.
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Thank you. I got Housman very early, partly out of context, and he has been important to me since I started to pay attention to him. I don't love all of his poems equally and some not at all, but the ones that matter to me really do. For example, you will see why I kept holding on to the last six lines of "The Oracles" as I was driving off to Somerville to vote.
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Thank you!
(F.R. Leavis falls into the category of people where statistically the exception must exist, but I have never run across anyone who didn't want to flatten him. I think I heard of him first in A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990), where the reference is not flattering.)
Now I want to see a production of "The Invention of Love."
I never have. I was a classics student at Brandeis when it was produced on Broadway and somehow it did not happen that I traveled to see it. I read the play. A friend who is no longer on LJ/DW, who had seen the production, said that he thought of me at the outraged line "It's half Greek and half Latin!"
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So very much this. A style can be Not For You; that doesn't mean the style is a priori invalid. Half the point of poetry is to say things in a way that isn't how people would normally express themselves.
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That is an amazing line. XD
Still, defend your favourites! Defend the right to live for cricket, if that's what does it for you! <3
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His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
When you live as close as we do the the places mentioned here, it brings it even closer to home.
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I suspect that the reason she's unable to appreciate Housman is, they both had precious little sense of humour about their own pathos but he had just enough more than she did to make her self-conscious.
It's true that some of what Housman's narrators experience as pathos is legible as bathos to the reader
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?"
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It is! And permanently associated in my mind with F.R. Leavis, so A+ demolition job.
Still, defend your favourites! Defend the right to live for cricket, if that's what does it for you!
Whatever it is!
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Why, if your throat tis hard to slit Slit your girl's and swing for it.
Thank you for the reminder. In return:
When lads have done with labour
In Shropshire, one will cry
"Let's go and kill a neighbour,
And t'other answers "Aye!"
So this one kills his cousins,
And that one kills his dad
And, as they hang by dozens
At Ludlow, lad by lad,
Each of them one-and-twenty,
All of them murderers,
The hangman mutters: "Plenty
Even for Housman's verse."
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Yes.
(Thank you for thinking it's not petty of me.)
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Sitwell's own Façade (1923) is—as noted by the link along with the content warnings—heavily structured by experiments in rhythm and sound and doesn't sound like her prose because it's not supposed to! It's just such a weird critique to have of a poet.
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"Clay lies still, but blood's a rover."
(To which I must append this post, because it took him forever to work that line out and I love it. It's in Tom Burns Haber's The Manuscript Poems of A. E. Housman (1955), which I am hoping to unpack with the rest of my books in the nearish future.)
I mostly noticed King doing that in the Dark Tower books; I haven't read enough of his horror to know if it's a consistent trait. But I love it when it happens.
I have not read enough of Stephen King even to notice that it's something he does, so I think that's really neat.
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Helps that they're compulsively memorizable.
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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.
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That makes sense to me.
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I am glad that is true of your geography.
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If I still had my copies of the Dark Tower books, I would go digging for the bit where the main characters commit themselves to the quest and see if it holds up the way it did when I first read it. I just remember getting chills on my initial encounter, from language that was very simple and in no way reaching for Ye Olde Epick Heights.
Alas, there is a two-week wait on a library ebook. :-P
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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
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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.
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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?
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It was sort of a delayed fuse effect, but as I recall, hilarity.
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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.
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P.
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I later made a friend who worked backstage at the Guthrie, and who had been working that production; and eventually we had a conversation in which she said, "That was YOU? The actors LOVED it." So we felt better after that.
P.
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As well you should have!
I was the one person in the theater for the NTLive broadcast of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art in 2010 who laughed out loud at a line repurposed from the rehearsal tapes of the War Requiem, partly because I was delighted to recognize it, but it's also a funny line on its own, so I wasn't sure what everyone else's problem was.
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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.
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I will just point out that if you were taught him uncritically, that would affect your readiness to flatten. When you came around to him on your own time, it sounds like the banhammer came out.