A. E. Housman
No one, not even Cambridge, was to blame
(Blame if you like the human situation):
Heart-injured in North London,1 he became
The Latin Scholar of his generation.
Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love,2 his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor.
In savage foot-notes on unjust editions
He timidly attacked the life he led,
And put the money of his feelings on
The uncritical relations of the dead,
Where only geographical divisions
Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.
W. H. AUDEN
Alfred Edward Housman was educated at Bromsgrove School, read Greats at Oxford but inexplicably failed his finals. For the next ten years he worked as a clerk in the Patent Office in London, retaining his sanity by publishing articles on Propertius, Ovid, Juvenal and other favourite classical authors. In 1892 he was appointed Professor of Latin at London University, and produced his definitive edition of Manilius, which appeared in five volumes between 1903 and 1930; in January 1911 Housman was appointed Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge and elected a Fellow of Trinity College. His daily routine was predictable. He lectured twice a week, enjoyed solitary walks after lunch for as long as two hours, relished good food and wine in moderation, often travelled to London to dine with male friends such as William Rothenstein or Grant Richards, and went on to a music hall. He usually holidayed abroad, preferring France, where he could eat well (he occasionally dined at the Tour d’Argent) and visit cathedrals. After A Shropshire Lad had been published in 1896, Housman continued to write verse into his notebooks, and his Last Poems were published in 1922. Praefanda, a collection of bawdy and obscene passages from Latin authors, was published in 1931 with a learned preface of solemn irony. More Poems appeared in 1936, and eighteen further poems were printed in Laurence Housman’s Memoir of his brother (1937). The Collected Poems appeared in 1939.
It was at Oxford that Housman fell in love, unrequitedly, with Moses Jackson, a fellow student at St John’s College. Shortly after coming to London, Housman shared lodgings for almost two years with Moses and his brother, Adalbert, in Bayswater. They seemed to live in harmony, until one day Housman inexplicably disappeared. We can only guess what happened. Housman may have opened his heart to Moses, who must have been profoundly shocked, especially as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which made homosexuality, in any form, illegal, had just been passed. Housman reappeared, took lodgings briefly in Northumberland Place and then in Highgate with a landlady named Mrs Hunter at Byron Cottage, 17 North Road. Moses Jackson’s influence on Housman’s poetry is clear from a letter (whereabouts unknown) that the poet wrote, much later, to his friend: ‘You are largely responsible for my writing poetry and you ought to take the consequences.’ Moses, a brilliant scientist and athlete, became Principal of Sind College, Karachi, at the end of 1887. He returned on leave to England in 1889, when he married a young widow, Rosa Chambers. Housman was not only not invited to the wedding but was also kept in the dark. At Housman’s instigation, Moses was elected a Fellow of University College London in January 1894. Housman also supported Moses’ application to become headmaster of University College School – to no avail. By 1898 there had been a reconciliation between the two men, and in 1900 Moses asked Housman to become godfather to his fourth son. In 1903, Housman published a dedicatory poem in Latin to Jackson in the first volume of his Manilius. Moses Jackson died of stomach cancer on 14 January 1923.
Towards the end of his life, on 5 February 1933, Housman replied to a questionnaire that had been sent him by Maurice Pollet, a teacher of English Literature at the Lycée d’Oran in Algeria. As it reveals much of his character, it is printed here in full:
As some of the questions which you ask in your flattering curiosity may be asked by future generations, and as many of them can only be answered by me, I make this reply.
I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time. My father’s family was Lancashire and my mother’s Cornish. I had a sentimental feeling for Shropshire because its hills were our western horizon. I know Ludlow and Wenlock, but my topographical details – Hughley, Abdon under Clee – are sometimes quite wrong. Remember that Tyrtaeus was not a Spartan. [He was the national poet of Sparta in the seventh century BC; but according to tradition an Athenian.]
I took an interest in astronomy almost as early as I can remember; the cause, I think, was a little book we had in the house.
I was brought up in the Church of England and in the High Church party, which is much the best religion I have ever come across. But Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, which fell into my hands when I was eight, attached my affections to paganism. I became a deist at thirteen and an atheist at twenty-one.
I never had any scientific education.
I wrote verse at eight or earlier, but very little until I was thirty-five.
Oxford had not much effect on me, except that I there met my greatest friend.
When I was at the Patent Office I read a great deal of Greek and Latin at the British Museum of an evening.
While at University College, which is not residential, I lived alone in lodgings in the environs of London. A Shropshire Lad was written at Byron Cottage, 17 North Road, Highgate, where I lived from 1886 to 1905.
A Shropshire Lad was offered to Macmillan, and declined by them on the advice, I am told, of John Morley, who was their reader. Then a friend introduced me to Kegan Paul; but the book was published at my own expense.
The Shropshire Lad is an imaginary figure, with something of my temper and view of life. Very little in the book is biographical. [Housman is being disingenuous here: several of the poems seem to be inspired by his unrequited love for Moses Jackson.]
‘Reader of the Greek Anthology’ is not a good name for me. Of course I have read it, or as much of it as is worth reading, but with no special heed; and my favourite Greek poet is Aeschylus. No doubt I have been unconsciously influenced by the Greeks and Latins, but I was surprised when critics spoke of my poetry as ‘classical’. Its chief sources of which I am conscious are Shakespeare’s songs, the Scottish Border ballads and Heine.
‘Oh stay at home’ [Last Poems 38] was written years before the Great War, and expresses no change of opinion, only a different mood. The Great War cannot have made much change in the opinions of any man of imagination.
I have never had any such thing as a ‘crisis of pessimism’. In the first place, I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that is owing to my observation of the world, not to personal circumstances. [A pejorist is one who believes that the world is becoming worse.] Secondly, I did not begin to write poetry in earnest until the really emotional part of my life was over; and my poetry, as far as I could make out, sprang chiefly from physical conditions, such as a relaxed sore throat during my most prolific period, the first five months of 1895.
I respect the Epicureans more than the Stoics, but I am myself a Cyrenaic [i.e. belonging to the school of the Socratic philosopher Aristippus of Cyrene, whose doctrine was one of practical hedonism]. Pascal and Leopardi I have studied with great admiration; Villon and Verlaine very little, Calderon and German philosophers not at all. For Hardy I felt affection, and high admiration for some of his novels and a few of his poems.
I am yours very truly
A. E. Housman
Refused by Macmillan, the sixty-three poems of A Shropshire Lad were finally published in 1896 by Kegan Paul. Several had been written during Oscar Wilde’s trial for homosexual acts, and it is quite possible that some of the obliquely gay poems were included as a conscious or subconscious reaction to the inhumanity of that trial. During Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading Gaol, one of his closest friends, Robert Ross, learnt a number of the Shropshire Lad poems by heart and recited them during a visit to Wilde in prison. A mere 500 copies were printed and Housman had to pay £30 – then a considerable sum – towards the volume’s publication. Many of these poems are spoken by, or addressed to, a farm boy or a soldier. Housman, in his letter to M. Pollet, cited Heinrich Heine as a formative influence on his own poetry, and Matthew Arnold, in his essay on Heinrich Heine, described the German poet in words that refer with equal validity to Housman: ‘The magic of Heine’s poetical form is incomparable; he employs this form with the most exquisite lightness and ease, and yet it has at the same time the inborn fullness, pathos, and old-world charm of all true forms of popular poetry.’ Very few consecutive poems in A Shropshire Lad have the same metrical character; and like Horace in the Odes, Housman was adept at orchestrating his poems into sequences full of contrasts, both in theme and form: longer poems (rarely chosen by composers), for example, are often followed by shorter ones. A Shropshire Lad initially met with little success. By the end of 1898 only 494 copies had been sold; and seven years after its publication a mere 1,475 copies. From 1906 to 1911, however, A Shropshire Lad sold on average 13,500 a year. It has never once been out of print, and Housman didn’t take a royalty until 1922, when he discovered that Grant Richards, who had taken over the publishing of A Shropshire Lad from Kegan Paul, had often spent and squandered the money from the royalties.
Though many poems in A Shropshire Lad deal with soldiers and war, it must be remembered that they were written before the Boer War and the First World War. Housman’s interest in soldiery had been awaked by a childhood visit to London to see the Guards, and this fascination was intensified when his brother Herbert enlisted in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and was sent to fight in the Boer War, which broke out in 1899. In response to his brother’s vivid description of the appalling conditions the soldiers had to suffer, Housman wrote a series of poems that can indeed be defined as war poetry: ‘Illic jacet’, ‘Grenadier’, ‘Lancer’ and others were all published in Last Poems. Herbert was killed in action on 30 October 1901 at the Battle of Bakenlaagte.
Housman’s poems have been set to music more often than those of any other English poet with the possible exception of Shakespeare and de la Mare. ‘I always give my consent to all composers in the hope of becoming immortal somehow,’ Housman once joked. Yet he could lose his temper when composers distorted his poetry. When Vaughan Williams omitted two verses from ‘Is my team ploughing?’ in his setting for On Wenlock Edge, Housman retorted: ‘I wonder how he would like me to cut two bars out of his music’ (letter to Grant Richards, 20 December 1920). On another occasion he declared that ‘neither illustrators nor composers care tuppence about words and generally do not understand them’. Housman’s taste in music was low-brow; he liked popular music and could make little of the art-song settings of his verse. He once said as much to Herbert Howells over dinner, whereupon the composer allegedly destroyed all his Housman settings. Before On Wenlock Edge was recorded in 1916 by Gervase Elwes, Vaughan Williams asked Housman’s permission, and Housman confided to Richards: ‘They can make their record if they like: all I want is not to have to write letters.’ The recording turned out to be a great success, and in 1923 Housman profited from it financially: ‘Boosey have suddenly enriched me with £6 for gramophone rights, Vaughan Williams, I think.’ Housman, however, was not impressed; for when his friend Percy Withers played him four of the songs from this recording, Housman showed ‘alarming signs of mental agitation’, Withers recalled in A. E. Housman – Personal Recollections. And when the eighteen-year-old Gurney, having composed ‘Loveliest of trees’ and ‘Is my team ploughing?’ (they were not published till 1926 as part of the Housman cycle The Western Playland), wrote a letter to Housman, it provoked this response on 16 May 1908 to Grant Richards:
Mr. I. B. Gurney (who resides in Gloucester Cathedral along with St. Peter and Almighty God) must not print the words of my poems in full on concert programmes (a course which I am sure his fellow-lodgers would disapprove of); but he is quite welcome to set them to music, and to have them sung, and to print their titles on programmes when they are sung.
There are currently over 160 song cycles based on A Shropshire Lad. Charles Wilfred Orr once said (see Stephen Cary’s ‘A. E. Housman and the Renaissance of English Song’) that ‘Housman wrote verse that was (a) beautiful, (b) scanned, (c) rhymed, and (d) made sense […] He is, I think, to English songwriters very much what Heine was to German and Verlaine to French composers.’ Lovers of Lieder will appreciate that Housman is also, to some degree, a late nineteenth-century incarnation of Wilhelm Müller. Housman’s hero, who shares some similarities with the protagonist of Müller’s Die Winterreise, questions religious faith and the value of human life in an age of war, acknowledges (as Hardy did) the crushing fatalism of existence and has a deep appreciation of the beauties of nature. As with Heine (excepting Die Nordsee), nature description in A Shropshire Lad almost always serves as a backdrop to the emotions of the poet or his protagonist. Like Heine, Housman was a master of the Stimmungsbrechung, the sting in the tail, the puncturing of mood, to which composers have not always attended; and, like Heine, Housman suffered from unrequited love.
Housman originally intended to call the volume The Poems of Terence Hearsay – a smokescreen which enabled him to explore his innermost feelings without embarrassment. Like Terence, the Greek dramatist, Housman was, in a sense, also an exile, living in London far away from the landscape he loved. It was A. W. Pollard who suggested that A Shropshire Lad was a better title, as he explains in Recollections: ‘A Shropshire Lad, under the name of Terence, was ready for publication […] my being entrusted with the manuscript led me to suggest that Terence was not an attractive title, and that in the phrase “A Shropshire Lad”, which he had used in the poem, he had much a better one. He agreed at once, and I think the change helped.’
The titles of the poems printed here were provided, almost without exception, by the composers. Only 16 of the 63 poems of A Shropshire Lad were given titles by Housman: ‘1887’, ‘Recruit’, ‘Reveille’, ‘March’, ‘To an athlete dying young’, ‘Bredon Hill’, ‘The Welsh marches’, ‘The Lent lily’, ‘The new mistress’, ‘The merry guide’, ‘The immortal part’, ‘The carpenter’s son’, ‘The true lover’, ‘The day of battle’, ‘The Isle of Portland’ and ‘Hughley Steeple’. A poem’s provenance is indicated below by ASL (A Shropshire Lad), LP (Last Poems), MP (More Poems) and AP (Additional Poems).
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now1
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
(Butterworth, Duke, Gurney, Herbert, Moeran, Orr, Peel)
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.’
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
‘The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.’
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
(Adams, Bax, Bliss, Butterworth, Gardiner, Gibbs, Gurney, Orr)
There pass the careless people
That call their souls their own:
Here by the road I loiter,
How idle and alone.
[Ah, past the plunge of plummet2,
In seas I cannot sound,
My heart and soul and senses,
World without end, are drowned.]
His folly has not fellow
Beneath the blue of day
That gives to man or woman
His heart and soul away.
[There flowers no balm to sain3 him
From east of earth to west
That’s lost for everlasting
The heart out of his breast.
Here by the labouring highway
With empty hands I stroll:
Sea-deep, till doomsday morning,
Lie lost my heart and soul.]
(Finzi)
In summertime on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires2 they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.
My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured3 counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky.
The bells would ring to call her
In valleys miles away:
‘Come all to church, good people;
Good people, come and pray.’
But here my love would stay.
And I would turn and answer
Among the springing thyme,
‘Oh, peal upon our wedding,
And we will hear the chime,
And come to church in time.’
But when the snows at Christmas
On Bredon top were strown,
My love rose up so early
And stole out unbeknown
And went to church alone.
They tolled the one bell only,
Groom there was none to see,
The mourners followed after,
And so to church went she,
And would not wait for me.
The bells they sound on Bredon,
And still the steeples hum.
‘Come all to church, good people,’ –
Oh, noisy bells, be dumb;
I hear you, I will come.
(Burrows, Butterworth, Duke, Peel, Vaughan Williams, Young)
The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread,
And out we troop to see:
A single redcoat2 turns his head,
He turns and looks at me.
My man, from sky to sky’s so far,
We never crossed before;
Such leagues apart the world’s ends are,
We’re like to meet no more;
What thoughts at heart have you and I
We cannot stop to tell;
But dead or living, drunk or dry,
Soldier, I wish you well.
(Berkeley, Ireland, Peel)
On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.
Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder2,
Soldiers marching, all to die.
East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.
Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me,3 I will rise.
(Butterworth, Gurney)
White in the moon the long road lies,
The moon stands blank1 above;
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.
Still hangs the hedge without a gust,
Still, still the shadows stay:
My feet upon the moonlit dust
Pursue the ceaseless way.
The world is round, so travellers tell,
And straight though reach the track,
Trudge on, trudge on, ’twill all be well,
The way will guide one back.
But ere the circle homeward hies
Far, far must it remove:
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.
(Burrows)
Think no more, lad; laugh, be jolly:
Why should men make haste to die?
Empty heads and tongues a-talking
Make the rough road easy walking,
And the feather pate of folly
Bears the falling sky.
Oh, ’tis jesting, dancing, drinking
Spins the heavy world around.
If young hearts were not so clever,
Oh, they would be young for ever:
Think no more; ’tis only thinking
Lays lads underground.
(Butterworth)
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,1
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
(Corp, Duke, Gurney, Orr)
The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow1 come in for the fair,
There’s men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,
The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,
And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old.
There’s chaps from the town and the field and the till2 and the cart,
And many to count are the stalwart, and many the brave,
And many the handsome of face and the handsome of heart,
And few that will carry their looks or their truth to the grave.
I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell
The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;
And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell
And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.
But now you may stare as you like and there’s nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.
(Butterworth, Finzi, Gurney, Moeran, Orr)
On Wenlock Edge2 the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin3 heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger4
When Uricon5 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.
(Gurney)
From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,1
The stuff of life to knit2 me
Blew hither: here am I.
Now – for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart –
Take my hand quick3 and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless way.
(Burrows)
‘Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?’
Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.
[‘Is football playing
Along the river shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?’
Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.]
‘Is my girl happy,
That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
As she lies down at eve?’
She lies not down to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
Be still, my lad, and sleep.
‘Is my friend hearty,
Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
A better bed than mine?’
Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.
(Burrows, Butterworth, Gurney, Orr)
Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.
And now the fancy passes by,
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they’ll say that I
Am quite myself again.
(Corp, Duke, Orr)
See above, under Somervell.
In valleys of springs of rivers,
By Ony2 and Teme and Clun,
The country for easy livers,
The quietest under the sun,
We still had sorrows to lighten,
One could not be always glad,
And lads knew trouble at Knighton3
When I was a Knighton lad.
By bridges that Thames runs under,
In London, the town built ill,
’Tis sure small matter for wonder
If sorrow is with one still.
And if as a lad grows older
The troubles he bears are more,
He carries his griefs on a shoulder
That handselled4 them long before.
Where shall one halt to deliver
This luggage I’d lief set down?
Not Thames, not Teme is the river,
Nor London nor Knighton the town:
’Tis a long way further than Knighton,
A quieter place than Clun,
Where doomsday may thunder and lighten
And little ’twill matter to one.
We’ll to the woods no more,
The laurels all are cut,1
The bowers are bare of bay
That once the Muses wore;
The year draws in the day
And soon will evening shut:
The laurels all are cut,
We’ll to the woods no more.
Oh we’ll no more, no more
To the leafy woods away,
To the high wild woods of laurel
And the bowers of bay no more.
(Finzi, Ireland, Thomas)
Along the field as we came by
A year ago, my love and I,
The aspen over stile and stone
Was talking to itself alone.
‘Oh who are these that kiss and pass?
A country lover and his lass;
And time shall put them both to bed,
But she shall lie with earth above,
And he beside another love.’
And sure enough beneath the tree
There walks another love with me,
And overhead the aspen heaves
Its rainy-sounding silver leaves;
And I spell1 nothing in their stir,
But now perhaps they speak to her,
And plain for her to understand
They talk about a time at hand
When I shall sleep with clover clad,
And she beside another lad.
(Gurney, Orr)
The half-moon westers low, my love,
And the wind brings up the rain;
And wide apart lie we, my love,
And seas between the twain.
I know not if it rains, my love,
In the land where you do lie;
And oh, so sound you sleep, my love,
You know no more than I.
(Berkeley, Burrows)
In the morning, in the morning,
In the happy field of hay,
Oh they looked at one another
By the light of day.
In the blue and silver morning
On the haycock as they lay,
Oh they looked at one another
And they looked away.
(Bax, Finzi)
The sigh that heaves the grasses
Whence thou wilt never rise
Is of the air that passes
And knows not if it sighs.
The diamond tears adorning
Thy low mound on the lea,
Those are the tears of morning,
That weeps, but not for thee.
(Burrows)
Oh see how thick the goldcup flowers
Are lying in field and lane,
With dandelions to tell the hours
That never are told again.
Oh may I squire you round the meads
And pick you posies gay?
– ’Twill do no harm to take my arm.
‘You may, young man, you may.’
Ah, spring was sent for lass and lad,
’Tis now the blood runs gold,
And man and maid had best be glad
Before the world is old.
What flowers to-day may flower to-morrow,
But never as good as new.
– Suppose I wound my arm right round –
‘’Tis true, young man, ’tis true.’
Some lads there are, ’tis shame to say,
That only court to thieve,
And once they bear the bloom away
’Tis little enough they leave.
Then keep your heart for men like me
And safe from trustless chaps.
My love is true and all for you.
‘Perhaps, young man, perhaps.’
Oh, look in my eyes then, can you doubt?
– Why, ’tis a mile from town.
How green the grass is all about!
We might as well sit down.
– Ah, life, what is it but a flower?
Why must true lovers sigh?
Be kind, have pity, my own, my pretty, –
‘Good-bye, young man, good-bye.’
When lads were home from labour
At Abdon2 under Clee,
A man would call his neighbour
And both would send for me.
And where the light in lances
Across the mead was laid,
There to the dances
I fetched my flute and played.
Ours were idle pleasures,
Yet oh, content we were,
The young to wind their measures,
The old to heed the air;
From tree and tower and steep
The light delaying,
And flute the sun to sleep.
The youth toward his fancy
Would turn his brow of tan,
And Tom would pair with Nancy
And Dick step off with Fan;
The girl would lift her glances
To his, and both be mute:
Well went the dances
At evening to the flute.
Wenlock Edge was umbered3,
And bright was Abdon Burf4,
And warm between them slumbered
The smooth green miles of turf;
Until from grass and clover
The upshot beam would fade,
And England over
Advanced the lofty shade.
The lofty shade advances,
I fetch my flute and play:
Come, lads, and learn the dances
And praise the tune to-day.
To-morrow, more’s the pity,
Away we both must hie,
To air the ditty,
And to earth I.
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
(Butterworth, Duke, Gurney, Orr)
Of Butterworth’s eighteen extant songs, eleven are settings of Housman. His original intention had been to write one large-scale song cycle from the fourteen poems he had earmarked in his own copy of A Shropshire Lad. By the time of his first MS copy (early 1911), however, he had already jettisoned four of the poems, but still intended to write a single cycle, beginning with ‘O fair to see’ and ending with ‘Bredon Hill’. Eventually, however, he decided to divide the songs into two groups (A Shropshire Lad and Bredon Hill and Other Songs), and added a poem not on the original list (‘On the idle hill of summer’) to the second.
See above, under Somervell.
See above, under Somervell.
Look not in my eyes, for fear
They mirror true the sight I see,
And there you find your face too clear
And love it and be lost like me.
One the long nights through must lie
Spent in star-defeated sighs,
But why should you as well as I
Perish? gaze not in my eyes.
A Grecian lad1, as I hear tell,
One that many loved in vain,
Looked into a forest well
And never looked away again.
There, when the turf in springtime flowers,
With downward eye and gazes sad,
Stands amid the glancing showers
A jonquil2, not a Grecian lad.
(Berkeley, Ireland)
See above, under Somervell.
See above, under Somervell.
See above, under Vaughan Williams.
See above, under Somervell.
Oh fair enough are sky and plain,
But I know fairer far:
Those are as beautiful again
That in the water are;
The pools and rivers wash so clean
The trees and clouds and air,
The like on earth was never seen,
And oh that I were there.
These are the thoughts I often think
As I stand gazing down
In act upon the cressy brink
To strip1 and dive and drown;
But in the golden-sanded brooks
And azure meres I spy
A silly lad that longs and looks
And wishes he were I.
When the lad for longing sighs,
Mute and dull of cheer and pale,
If at death’s own door he lies,
Maiden, you can heal his ail.
The wan look, the hollow tone,
The hung head, the sunken eye,
You can have them for your own.
Buy them, buy them: eve and morn
Lovers’ ills are all to sell.
Then you can lie down forlorn;
But the lover will be well.
See above, under Somervell.
See above, under Vaughan Williams.
Peter Pears writes on the sleeve of his LP recording of The Land of Lost Content (Argo):
Of all the Housman settings, and there are many, Ireland’s are the best; his edgy pessimistic nature matched the poet’s perfectly. The Land of Lost Content is among the earlier and least introvert of them; the vocal line is freer and more lyrical than it was to become in his later Housman settings and the piano writing clearer. Ireland was a decent pianist; most of his work involves a piano, whether alone or with voice and instruments, and when I sang these songs with him in his seventies, he attacked the keys with great brio even if by then his joints had grown a bit stiff! He meant his harmonic decorations to be heard and each added note is intended to be expressive. Ireland had almost an obsession with some of his own phrases; the descending passage on the piano which follows the words ‘Happy is the lover’ in the last song of The Land of Lost Content is one of them. It appears again in ‘The trellis’ and its spirit haunts ‘Friendship in misfortune’. It was originally the main ritornello of his setting of Sidney’s ‘My true love hath my heart’.
Ireland’s The Land of Lost Content dates from 1920–21 and takes its title from the first line of the second verse of ‘Into my heart an air that kills’, a poem, not set by Ireland, that he wished to print at the head of the cycle. Having applied to Housman for permission, Ireland received a letter from the poet, dated 17 March 1921, in which he gave the composer permission ‘to set to music all the poems he wishes, but he must not print No. 50 as a motto; nor No. 40, which is what he means’. (Ireland had confused the numbering.) Ireland must also have written Housman another letter about royalties, for three days later the composer received a reply which shows the poet in more indulgent mood: ‘I do not want revenue from gramophone and mechanical rights, and Mr Ireland is welcome to as much of it as his publisher will let him have. I hope it may be sufficient to console him for not being allowed to print the poem he wants.’
’Tis spring; come out to ramble
The hilly brakes around,
For under thorn and bramble
About the hollow ground
The primroses are found.
And there’s the windflower2 chilly
With all the winds at play,
And there’s the Lenten lily
That has not long to stay
And dies on Easter day.
And since till girls go maying3
You find the primrose still,
And find the windflower playing
With every wind at will,
But not the daffodil,
Upon the spring’s array,
And bear from hill and valley
The daffodil away
That dies on Easter day.
(Gurney, Orr)
See above, under Butterworth (‘Look not in my eyes, for fear’).
Twice a week the winter thorough
Here stood I to keep the goal:
Football then was fighting sorrow
For the young man’s soul.
Now in Maytime to the wicket
Out I march with bat and pad:
See the son of grief at cricket
Trying to be glad.
Try I will; no harm in trying:
Wonder ’tis how little mirth
Keeps the bones of man from lying
On the bed of earth.
(Finzi, Gurney)
If truth in hearts that perish
Could move the powers on high,
I think the love I bear you
Should make you not to die.
Sure, sure, if stedfast meaning,
If single1 thought could save,
The world might end to-morrow,
You should not see the grave.
This long and sure-set liking,
This boundless will to please,
– Oh, you should live for ever
If there were help in these.
But now, since all is idle,
To this lost heart be kind,
Ere to a town you journey
Where friends are ill to find.
See above, under Somervell (‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’).
You smile upon your friend to-day,
To-day his ills are over;
You hearken to the lover’s say,
And happy is the lover.
’Tis late to hearken, late to smile,
But better late than never:
I shall have lived a little while
Before I die for ever.
When smoke stood up from Ludlow,
And mist blew off from Teme,1
And blithe afield to ploughing
Against the morning beam
I strode beside my team,
The blackbird in the coppice
Looked out to see me stride,
And hearkened as I whistled
The trampling team beside,
And fluted and replied:
‘Lie down, lie down, young yeoman;
What use to rise and rise?
Rise man a thousand mornings
Yet down at last he lies,
And then the man is wise.’
I heard the tune he sang me,
And spied his yellow bill;
I picked a stone and aimed it
And threw it with a will:
Then the bird was still.
Then my soul within me
Took up the blackbird’s strain,
And still beside the horses
Along the dewy lane
It sang the song again:
‘Lie down, lie down, young yeoman;
The sun moves always west;
Will lead one home to rest,
And that will be the best.’
(Moeran, Orr)
Far in a western brookland1
That bred me long ago
The poplars stand and tremble
By pools I used to know.
There, in the windless night-time,
The wanderer, marvelling why,
Halts on the bridge to hearken
How soft the poplars sigh.
He hears: no more remembered
In fields where I was known,
Here I lie down in London
And turn to rest alone.
There, by the starlit fences,
The wanderer halts and hears
My soul that lingers sighing
About the glimmering weirs.
(Bax, Moeran)
’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town1
The golden broom should blow;
The hawthorn sprinkled up and down
Should charge the land with snow.
Spring will not wait the loiterer’s time
Who keeps so long away;
So others wear the broom and climb
The hedgerows heaped with may2.
Oh tarnish late on Wenlock Edge,
Gold that I never see;
Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge
That will not shower on me.
(Ireland, Moeran, Orr)
See above, under Somervell (‘The lads in their hundreds’).
See above, under Somervell.
See above, under Somervell.
See above, under Ireland.
Wake: the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims.
Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,
Trampled to the floor it spanned,
And the tent of night in tatters
Straws1 the sky-pavilioned land.
Up, lad, up, ’tis late for lying:
Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
‘Who’ll beyond the hills away?’
Towns and countries woo together,
Forelands beacon2, belfries call;
Never lad that trod on leather
Lived to feast his heart with all.
Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.
See above, under Somervell.
See above, under Vaughan Williams (‘With rue my heart is laden’).
See above, under Ireland (‘Goal and wicket’).
See above, under Vaughan Williams (‘Along the field’).
See above, under Vaughan Williams.
See above, under Somervell (‘Into my heart’).
The Sun at noon to higher air,
Unharnessing the silver Pair1
That late before his chariot swam,
Rides on the gold wool of the Ram.
So braver notes the storm-cock2 sings
To start the rusted wheel of things,
And brutes in field and brutes in pen
Leap that the world goes round again.
The boys are up the woods with day
To fetch the daffodils away,
And home at noonday from the hills
They bring no dearth of daffodils.
Afield for palms the girls repair,
And sure enough the palms are there,
And each will find by hedge or pond
Her waving silver-tufted wand.
In farm and field through all the shire
The eye beholds the heart’s desire;
Ah, let not only mine be vain,
For lovers should be loved again.
This still underrated composer set no fewer than twenty Housman poems to music. Orr’s obsession with Housman resembles Schubert’s with Goethe and Wolf’s with Mörike, as this unpublished letter to Eric Sams (quoted in Banfield’s Sensibility and English Song) makes clear:
My first acquaintance with him came, like I dare say so many other people’s did, through Graham Peel’s ‘In summertime on Bredon’ … I still have the pocket edition of A Shropshire Lad which came out in 1914, and which I carried about with me everywhere, learning almost all of the poems by heart, and hoping against hope that one day I might be able to set some of them in a way that Wolf or Schubert might have approved. (The vanity and ignorance of youth!)
‘Farewell to barn and stack and tree,
Farewell to Severn shore.
Terence1, look your last at me,
For I come home no more.
‘The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood is dried;
And Maurice amongst the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side.
‘My mother thinks us long away;
’Tis time the field were mown.
She had two sons at rising day,
Tonight she’ll be alone.
‘And here’s a bloody hand to shake,
And oh, man, here’s good-bye;
We’ll sweat no more on scythe and rake,
My bloody hands and I.
‘I wish you strength to bring you pride,
And a love to keep you clean,
And I wish you luck, come Lammastide2,
At racing on the green.
‘Long for me the rick will wait,
And long will wait the fold,
And long will stand the empty plate,
And dinner will be cold.’
(Moeran)
Berkeley first met Britten in 1936, and a long and intimate friendship developed. Britten’s diary entries of 29 and 30 July 1936 make interesting reading. The two composers were holidaying together in Cornwall, and Britten writes on 29 July: ‘After dinner – much walk & talk with Lennox & then we drive into Newquay with Miss N. [Ursula Nettleship] & pick up some friends of hers (mother, aunt, child) from a concert-hall – and we afterwards till 12.0 odd have tea with them. Long talks before sleep – it is extraordinary how intimate one becomes when the lights are out!’ And a day later he records: ‘In spite of his avowed sexual weakness for young men of my age & form – he is considerate & open, & we have come to an agreement on that subject.’ They were later to live together at Britten’s home in Snape, the Old Mill, and they worked together on a joint orchestral suite, Mont Juic. Berkeley’s Five Housman Songs were written after Pears and Britten had departed for America in 1939, and the choice of poems about Housman’s unrequited relationship with Moses Jackson, such as ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’, ‘He would not stay for me’ and ‘Because I liked you better’, suggests that, though Berkeley’s relationship with Britten probably remained essentially platonic, there was no lack of sexual attraction as far as Berkeley was concerned. The Britten–Berkeley relationship is brilliantly discussed in Tony Scotland’s Lennox & Freda (Michael Russell, 2010).
See above, under Vaughan Williams.
See above, under Somervell.
He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways.
See above, under Butterworth.
Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.
We parted, stiff and dry;
‘Good-bye,’ said you, ‘forget me.’
‘I will, no fear,’ said I.
If here, where clover whitens
The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts2 in the trefoiled grass,
Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.