I know we're all going to die once I feel all right

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

You're absolutely right, and Sitwell is wrong, and I can't tell whether she knows it and is just going for the easy joke. 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.

[swan_tower]

I don't know why, of all the poets I've encountered, Housman most reliably hits me in the gut; I only know that it's true.

[asakiyume]

everybody has something and cricket is no sillier than the gas fire you light instead of lying down in front of --I'm not intimate with the poems, and Sitwell's criticism is new to me, but I most definitely agree with this line.

[pameladean]

While I am happy to see F.R. Leavis flattened, I am much happier to see your defense of Housman. I think he is more nuanced than Sitwell thinks, and your exegesis was really lovely.

Now I want to see a production of "The Invention of Love."

P.

[thisbluespirit]

"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."

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

[mrissa]

I am at a phase in my life when I want to slap anybody who is that dismissive of something that keeps people carrying on. Even if it's cricket. Even if it's a cricket. Whatever it is. It is SO EASY to be blithely dismissive of other people's struggles, so much harder to express them. I feel like it's almost worse if she makes jokes like that without meaning them just to sound clever. Gross.

[cmcmck]

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
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.

[vass]

I've loved Sitwell's poems since I was about eleven, but she was... really not a very nice person. And was Wrong about many things.

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?"

[anna_wing]

Housman, Edna St Vincent Millay and Rudyard Kipling were the poets who hooked me young and have never really let go.