A. E. Housman

More Poems. By A. E. Housman. (Jonathan Cape. 5s.) A. E. Housman. A Sketch with Indexes of his classical writings. By A. S. F. (low. (Cambridge University Press. 7s. 6d.) More Poems should give pleasure to all Housman's .many readers : to his detractors, because-it contains several Pieces to which they will be pleased to point, quite justly, as alniost parodies of himself ; to his uncritical admirers simply because they will find in it, beyond expectation, a further and not unworthy instalment of A Shropshire Lad ; to those whose worship stops short this side idolatry, because it will afford them the opportunity of comparing Housman's less successful with his more successful efforts, and of speculating. which pieces he excluded front his earlier books and why he did soi. and because it contains not only several poems in which- Housman is at once at his best and his most characteristic, but also a few which are more intimate than, and in a way quite different from, anything published by him in his lifetime.

Almost all the new poems are entirely characteristic, full of the peculiar quality which invests everything that Housman published ; for even his few failures are unmistakably his, and carry a charm which reconciles the reader to words, images, and turns of phrase not easily defended against the objections of an unsympathetic critic. It is this charm which captures the unliterary as well as the literary, and makes them admire all his work with equal fervour ; it is a charm not unlike the charm of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyal.

What is its secret ? Like all charm, it cannot be analysed ; it is part of the man, and is not wholly explained by considering the mechanism of his verse or by recalling its themes- ' the passions and the moods that it expresses. To feel its force, one must read his poems at length : one likes them, or • one does not; there is no more to say.

But it is possible to discuss, and should be possible to explain, the difference between the good and the less good ; and it is interesting to read Housman's poems carefully, with an eye on his technique (he studied the craft of verse-writing very minutely; as appears from a note in The Name and Nature of Poetry), and to notice when his failures are due to mere exploitation of a knack or repetition of a formula—to a feeling too easily expressed—and when they are due to something not felt, or felt too easily.

A review does not afford space to do more than indicate the lines which such criticism might take : Housman's poetic genius cannot be illustrated by selections (he was quite right not to allow his poems to appear in anthologies), for an isolated stanza or two does not do him justice; nothing, on the other hand, is easier than by such a selection to exaggerate his weakness and to make what is in keeping in its context appear affected or ridiculous by isolation.

Some indication of the quality of the new book may be gathered, however, from the following :

Bells in tower at evening toll,

And the day forsakes the soul ; Soon will evening's self be gone And the whispering night come on.

Blame not thou the blinded light Nor the whisper of the night :

Though the whispering night were still, Yet the heart would counsel ill.

This is not outstanding in merit, but it is a good example of how economically and effectively Housman can convey a mood. We hear in the reduplicated " t" the measured toll of the bell, and the thin long " a's " in the second line contrast with the deeper vowel-sounds that precede them, and suggest the dreary forsakenness which the line describes (substitute " desert " for " forsake" and see what is lost). Between stanzas 1 and 2 there is, as it were, a whole stanza in which nothing is said, but in which the word " whisper " has acquired a sinister meaning. The strong alliteration in line 5 masks and makes more effective that in line 6; the last line is weak, for the last two syllables are cacophonous, and it may be that this cacophony led Housman to reject the.poem.

This may be taken to represent the average of the poems: sometimes a poem falls below it because the artifice seems too easy--

But now their coins are tarnished

Their towers decayed away, Their kingdoms swept and garnished

For haler kings than they—

sometimes. _because the, verse itself does not., convince us . of the genuineness of the mood, so that an attitude seems merely a pose: Then came I crying, and today, With heavier cause to plain, Depart I into death away, .Not to be born again.

Stirrender to the music and accept the idiom, and the verse gives nothing but pleasure ; but by a severer standard it is condemned, and Housman •no 'doubt .rejected such poems because he had done the same thing, and had done it more successfully, already. We should not, however, be ungrateful to his brother for now printing them, since, in this separate volume, they do not spoil his other work, and they afford material for an interesting comparison.

It is easy to illustrate these fallings away from Housman's suprenaely high standard, but harder to illustrate his successes

by quotation. The opening poem deserves to be quoted, however, for it is one of several in which there sounds a note not familiar from his earlier work ; it is called Easter Hymn, and this is the first verse :

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain, You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain, Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night The hate you died to quench and could but fan, Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

It seems here as if the poet were -speaking in a more directly personal tone, the rhythm and form are less epigrammatic, less lapidary than usual ; the cloak of convention has been cast aside. This abandonment of convention shows most strikingly in the personal poems in this volume : in several of these we hear Housman speaking undisguisedly in the first person and not through the mouth of Terence ; and the effect of these poems—for instance, XL (" Farewell to a name and a

number "), LXII (headed with the initials " A. J. J."), XLIV (addressed to " Andrea "),-Tis not to shoW that the Terence poems, with their "my lads," their red-coats, their death in battle and their prison-yards, are unreal, but to demonstrate the depth and nature of the emotion which needed that imaginary setting and those half-real characters for its poetic expression.

These poems reveal pretty clearly (and those who care most for Housman will find the revelation least surprising) the spring of Housman's personal emotions. Light on his way of life, on the side of his nature which he showed to his colleagues and acquaintances, comes from Mr. Gow's biography. This is more than a mere record of the few events of Housman's career, it is an exceedingly sympathetic account of his char- acter, and it explains clearly the two motives which drove him to the life of a scholar and a recluse—the passion for truth and the shrinking from personal contacts which he feared might hurt him more deeply than he could bear. Mr. Gow knew his colleague probably as well as any man during the last-twenty-five years of his life ; he has said all that needed to be said, and it could not have been said better. It is not too much to say that it is worthy of its subject, and Mr. Gow will not ask for higher praise than that.

JOHN SPARROW..