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You might have looked through Ludlow fair and never spied a sillier pair
Probably the first line I ever read by A.E. Housman was out of context. It was in the butterfly's speech in Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn (1968): "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover, so I should be called kill-devil all the parish over." At age six or eight, I had no way of discerning what was quotation and what was original; I can't even remember when I learned the real rest of the quatrain, or that it famously ended a poem called "Reveille."1 The answer is probably in college; a dear friend sans livejournal performed four settings of Housman for a recital we did together in our junior year and I see it was the next semester that I wrote the golem story whose title was eventually "Clay Lies Still." I have no memory of reading the rest of his work for the first time, but by the time I went to grad school, an old hardcover of his collected poems was stacked next to Robinson Jeffers in the pride-of-place bookcase beside my bed. The point is, you should understand why it made me so happy to see, among the drafts and fragments and half-filled scansions of Housman's manuscript poems, the following record:
Lads were born to play the rover,
Legs
Feet were wrought to play the rover
Rest for night, a lad's a rover;
Stones lie
Dust lies still but blood's a rover;
Clay
Because "Reveille" isn't my favorite poem by Housman, but I love that line (and its proper continuation: "Breath's a ware that will not keep"); it feels like the turn of a ballad or the summing-up of a tragic chorus, at once dense with myth and metaphysics and as simple as well-joined wood, as though there were no other way for those thoughts to come into speech. And of course the muse doesn't simply breathe through your fingers. I should be so lucky as to come up with an image as precise and powerful as Housman's blood and clay, but I have pages of discarded variations that look exactly like those copied and struck-out lines, working toward the right words. I like knowing—not because it demystifies, but because it makes real—that the road to Shropshire is littered with inkblots and balled-up papers as well.
The other fragment I love is this, which seems never to have found the right words for the rest of its poem:
Hills sky-splintered with thunder
And towns sea-swallowed of God.2
I know he left Greek for Latin, but that's as pure as any papyrus scrap of Sappho. You can hear the splitting air and the sea's toll.
Can anyone recommend a biography of A.E. Housman? Much as I love it, I am aware that Stoppard's The Invention of Love (1997) does not count.
1. This was a recurring motif of my reading life: discovering that Diana Wynne Jones did not write "Go and catch a falling star," or Madeleine L'Engle "Saint Patrick's Breastplate", or Susan Cooper the "Song of Amergin" or—back to Housman—"White in the moon the long road lies." One of the hazards of being an early reader; I was introduced to all sorts of allusions out of order.* And then ran into the originals where I wasn't expecting them, like collections of poetry I had picked up from used book stores because I liked something else by the author. Ah, the heady days before Google. The butterfly, however, will mess you up for life. "Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, look down that lonesome road . . ."
* I was also, for a number of years, under the impression my grandmother had written "Shake hands, we never shall be friends" because I found it first in her handwriting, untitled and unattributed, on a separate sheet pasted into her student copy of Louis Untermeyer's Modern American and British Poetry (1942) in whose margins she was accustomed to take notes and make observations to herself. I used to read it upstairs in the guest bedroom of my grandparents' house in Maine; I remember that I loved H.D.'s "Oread," but I never connected the printed pages of Housman to the extra poem stuck in among them. I found out, I think, in that case by asking my mother.
2. Apparently not even death can stop A.E. Housman from being a textual analysis magnet. This couplet appears on the one damaged page in the entire secondhand book, so that I had to look closely at the torn paper—not ripped through, merely peeled off enough to lose the lettering—to be sure of the first epithet. If this were a critical edition, it should be represented:
Hills sky[-spli]ntered with thunder
And to[wn]s sea-swallowed of God.
And now I am disappointed I don't have Housman with apparatus criticus.
Lads were born to play the rover,
Feet were wrought to play the rover
Rest for night, a lad's a rover;
Clay
Because "Reveille" isn't my favorite poem by Housman, but I love that line (and its proper continuation: "Breath's a ware that will not keep"); it feels like the turn of a ballad or the summing-up of a tragic chorus, at once dense with myth and metaphysics and as simple as well-joined wood, as though there were no other way for those thoughts to come into speech. And of course the muse doesn't simply breathe through your fingers. I should be so lucky as to come up with an image as precise and powerful as Housman's blood and clay, but I have pages of discarded variations that look exactly like those copied and struck-out lines, working toward the right words. I like knowing—not because it demystifies, but because it makes real—that the road to Shropshire is littered with inkblots and balled-up papers as well.
The other fragment I love is this, which seems never to have found the right words for the rest of its poem:
Hills sky-splintered with thunder
And towns sea-swallowed of God.2
I know he left Greek for Latin, but that's as pure as any papyrus scrap of Sappho. You can hear the splitting air and the sea's toll.
Can anyone recommend a biography of A.E. Housman? Much as I love it, I am aware that Stoppard's The Invention of Love (1997) does not count.
1. This was a recurring motif of my reading life: discovering that Diana Wynne Jones did not write "Go and catch a falling star," or Madeleine L'Engle "Saint Patrick's Breastplate", or Susan Cooper the "Song of Amergin" or—back to Housman—"White in the moon the long road lies." One of the hazards of being an early reader; I was introduced to all sorts of allusions out of order.* And then ran into the originals where I wasn't expecting them, like collections of poetry I had picked up from used book stores because I liked something else by the author. Ah, the heady days before Google. The butterfly, however, will mess you up for life. "Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, look down that lonesome road . . ."
* I was also, for a number of years, under the impression my grandmother had written "Shake hands, we never shall be friends" because I found it first in her handwriting, untitled and unattributed, on a separate sheet pasted into her student copy of Louis Untermeyer's Modern American and British Poetry (1942) in whose margins she was accustomed to take notes and make observations to herself. I used to read it upstairs in the guest bedroom of my grandparents' house in Maine; I remember that I loved H.D.'s "Oread," but I never connected the printed pages of Housman to the extra poem stuck in among them. I found out, I think, in that case by asking my mother.
2. Apparently not even death can stop A.E. Housman from being a textual analysis magnet. This couplet appears on the one damaged page in the entire secondhand book, so that I had to look closely at the torn paper—not ripped through, merely peeled off enough to lose the lettering—to be sure of the first epithet. If this were a critical edition, it should be represented:
Hills sky[-spli]ntered with thunder
And to[wn]s sea-swallowed of God.
And now I am disappointed I don't have Housman with apparatus criticus.
Would he had blotted a thousand
Can't help you on the biographical front, sorry.
no subject
You win Housman criticism.
Also, I can't believe he wrote "Breath's a ware that will not keep" without having "Youth's a stuff will not endure" echoing somewhere in his noggin, a bit too close for comfort?
I hadn't made the connection till now. Thank you. (In return, you too can have Ben Kingsley and Imelda Staunton stuck in your head for the rest of the day.)
Can't help you on the biographical front, sorry.
Is okay. I tend to find biographies by accident in bookstores, so I figured I would do something radical and ask this time.
no subject
Thanks! I'd not heard that version, and it was a lot more fun than what was stuck in my head before.
no subject
Welcome. It tends to alternate with "The Wind and the Rain."
(Both recordings are from Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996), which I highly recommend; I kept meaning to post about it and then never did. Richard Grant is miscast as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, but Imogen Stubbs is an amazing Viola and ditto Nigel Hawthorne for Malvolio. I had no idea until I saw it that Ben Kingsley could sing.)