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His father, Edward, was a solicitor, though not an industrious one, preferring, with the cushion of inherited income, the life of a country squire. Forth I must by hedgerow bowers To look at the leaves uncurled And stand in the fields where cuckoo flowers Are lying about the world.Īs Housman said, in some annoyance, about a line of Milton's that made him weep, 'What in the world is there to cry about?'Īlfred Edward Housman was born in 1859, in Fockbury, a hamlet not in Shropshire but in the adjacent county of Worcestershire. When green buds hang in the elm like dust And sprinkle the lime like rain, Forth I wander, forth I must And drink of life again.

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It is true that the ideal Housman reader would have the Authorized Version of the Bible, especially the Book of Isaiah, the Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, at his or her fingertips, plus a heavy grounding in Milton and, for good measure, all of Horace and Heine but we regret that the ideal reader is unavailable at this time, and thus the field is left open to nonprofessionals-to those who have just enough time to wonder why a poem that appears, in paraphrase, to be full of the joys of spring should sound, with its long autumnal vowels, like a lament: You do not emend Housman, perhaps the most forbidding textual commentator in the history of English-speaking scholarship, and get off lightly.ĭo people still turn to Housman in their hour of need, or will it require Tom Stoppard, or another high-profile court case, to revive our fascination? To be sure, there is much in the poems that will ring awkwardly in the modern ear most of us find it hard to muster an enthusiasm for 'many a rose-lipt maiden / And many a lightfoot lad.' But poetry survives the death of its diction, and there is a gentle yet insistent pressure in Housman's verse which cannot be ignored, like someone taking your arm and telling you to come for a walk. (Imagine that hard final rhyme rebounding like the blow of a hammer off the courtroom walls.) The young murderers were spared execution, although a crime of almost equal magnitude was perpetrated in the process: Darrow had changed 'county kerchief' to 'county sheriff' for maximum effect. Oh let not man remember The soul that God forgot, But fetch the county kerchief And noose me in the knot, And I will rot. A devotee of American humor, with an unlikely fondness for Anita Loos, Housman never came to America, but he was visited in 1927 by Clarence Darrow, who, Housman said, 'often used my poems to rescue his clients from the electric chair.' In particular, Darrow had, when defending Leopold and Loeb three years before, proclaimed the lines On occasion, his work has been the instrument less of succor than of practical help. After all, how consoling are those lines? If you were the parent of a dead soldier, Housman would give you plenty to take pride in on the other hand, the poem-this is all it consists of-is spoken not by the mourners but by those who are mourned, and the last line, if read out loud, could easily sound bitter at the premature dashing of hopes. That is Housman for you: the more simple, even heroic, the note he sounds-and the words of the poem above are as plain as crotchets on a stave-the more you catch a strain of discord or unease beating time below. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young. Here dead lie we because we did not choose To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

Housman was never Poet Laureate-he turned down almost all honors that came his way, managing to appear both lofty and lowly-but, to more than one generation, his poetry became an unofficial well of consolation: After a slow start, it found particular favor during the Boer War, in which Housman lost a brother, and especially during the First World War, in which everyone lost brothers and sons. He has never really wilted out of fashion 'A Shropshire Lad,' his first and most celebrated book of poems, has remained in print since it was published, in 1896. If all goes according to plan, and if 'The Invention of Love' hits the public nerve as sharply as Stoppard's 'The Real Thing' did in revival last year, then, come spring, Housman should be back in leaf. Housman: poet, clerk, classical scholar, and gourmet, with a palate so fearless that he once dined on hedgehogs. The most recent play by Sir Tom Stoppard, 'The Invention of Love,' will shortly be unveiled on Broadway.

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