Why Housman holds up
Aged 12 or 13 I copied several poems by Housman into a commonplace book I had been encouraged to keep. An English master had read several Housman poems to us, and I’ve been grateful ever since. For some years Housman was my favourite poet, till superseded by Byron (Don Juan especially) and Eliot. The melody or music of the verse no doubt appealed, the mood and message also: ‘We for a certainty are not the first/ Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled/ Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed/ Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.’ Just the stuff for an adolescent oppressed by an unsympathetic housemaster and twice-daily chapel.
Actually there came a time when the admiration faded, the gratitude grew weak. In youth one is too often too easily impressed by others’ opinions, granting them an authority they scarcely deserve. This was my experience when, in my first year at Cambridge, I read Orwell’s essay, Inside the Whale, and discovered that admiring Housman was a sad mistake. ‘It merely tinkles,’ Orwell wrote dispprovingly of the verse. ‘Hard cheese, old chap’, was his response to the sentiments of The Shropshire Lad. Clearly one was in the position of that rising young novelist in Wodehouse’s story The Clicking of Cuthbert who rashly speaks of his admiration for a certain Russian novelist to the visiting lion, Vladimir Brusilov, only to be told that the said novelist is ‘no good’. Housman, it seemed, was likewise ‘no good’, a poet for immature public schoolboys, not for stern and committed adults.
In truth Orwell was being somewhat disingenuous. He wrote little verse himself, but, when he did so, the echo of Housman’s voice is audible: ‘To left the black and budless trees,/ The empty sties, the barns that stand ...’ He was in any case an unreliable judge of poetry. The best he could say of Kipling is that he was ‘a good bad poet’, while elsewhere dismissing Auden as ‘a sort of gutless Kipling’. Though he had a real feeling for poetry, he was always inclined to attach too much importance to a poet’s message.
Housman himself had a better understanding: ‘Poetry is not the thing said, but a way of saying it.’ And it is his way of saying that draws one back to his poems and makes them lodge in the memory. ‘Into my heart an air that kills/ From yon far country blows:/ What are those blue remembered hills,/ What spires, what farms are those?’ Or ‘Rest you, charger, rust you, bridle;/ Kings and kesars, keep your pay;/ Soldier, sit you down and idle /At the inn of night for aye.’ Or again: ‘See in mid heaven the sun is mounted; hark,/ The belfries tingle to the noonday chime./ ’Tis silent, and the subterranean dark/ Has crossed the nadir and begins to climb.’ It is melancholy and seductive music, and I suppose I have more of Housman by heart than any other poet except Shakespeare and the unknown makers of the Border Ballads.
Of course his range is narrow but this scarcely matters. What he does could scarcely be better done. It may be that, as Wavell said of the FitzGerald Rubaiyat, ‘the philosophy is shallow and pagan’, but he puts, in memorable words, the thoughts and feelings we must all have had, and this surely is a prime task of the poet.
Poetry is mysterious. He knew that. In his lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, he quotes six words, a single line, of Milton. ‘Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more’; and asks:
What is it [in these words] that can draw tears? What in the world is there to cry about? Why have these mere words the physical effect of pathos when the sense of the passage is blythe and gay? I can only say, because they are poetry, and find their way to something in man which is obscure and latent, something older than the present organisation of his nature, like the patches of fen which still linger here and there in drained lands of Cambridgeshire.
‘Words that finds their way to something in man that is obscure and latent’: it is this effect that his own verses have.
Critics may find little to say of Housman. You either feel and respond to the magic or you don’t. The poems are hit or miss, but at their best they stay with you. T. S. Eliot once said to George Barker, ‘We would all write like Housman if we could.’ Barker himself, like those very different poets, Larkin and Amis, adored Housman’s work and would call for it more often than the verses of any other poet when poems were recited round the supper table littered with dead bottles.
Allan Massie
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