The first speaker in this poem [A Shropshire Lad] begins his criticism of his friend Terence's poetry with these words:

“Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.”

(ll. 1-4)

Thirty-eight lines later, Terence defends his work in this way:

'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:

(ll. 49-50)

But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;

(ll. 53-56)

Though “Terence” is among the most discussed of Housman's poems, the flat contradiction between Terence's unnamed friend's “There can't be much amiss” and his own “When your soul is in my soul's stead” has never, as nearly as I can tell, been noticed in print. Much less has it been explained how a drinking companion close enough to Terence to attack his poetry head-on without giving offence could be this blind to the real state of his friend's soul.

It will probably come as no surprise that the burden of this paper is to offer just such an explanation, one that—to my mind, anyway—adds significantly to the interest of this interesting poem.

First, a short paraphrase. Terence, who is of course the Shropshire lad, and his friend—and perhaps others (“We poor lads …” l. 9)—are eating and drinking in a pub. Terence's friend has just read, or had read to him (“This” l. 1), the sixty-one poems that precede “Terence” in A Shropshire Lad. (Only one follows it: “I Hoed and Trenched and Weeded,” also a defense by Terence of his own poetry, though on different grounds from those of “Terence.”)

Terence's friend's response is the bluff and good-humored expostulation that opens the poem. Terence's verse, he says, “gives a chap the belly-ache” (l. 6). And he hints in the first passage quoted in this paper that since Terence obviously feels fine, his gloomy poetry is insincere. Terence's friend then concludes:

“Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.”

(ll. 11-14)

Terence's defense of his poetry (and, by implication, similar poetry by others) takes up the poem's remaining sixty-two lines.

He begins by saying, in witty, alliterative, allusive language, that drink is better suited than any poetry to produce the effect his friend seeks. But “The mischief is that 'twill not last” (l. 28). This gray fact Terence documents humorously from his own experience, and then he comes to the crux of his (and the poem's) argument.

Terence admits that his poetry is mostly concerned—as his friend has charged and as the reader knows who comes upon LXII in its place in A Shropshire Lad rather than in an anthology—with decay, loss, inconstancy, melancholy, and death, often, curiously, death imposed as punishment by the state. But he insists that that is precisely its value, precisely the source of its power to “train” (l. 48) its reader to carry on when he or she encounters these things, not in art, but in reality—in other words, “When your soul is in my soul's stead” (l. 56). The immediate context of this last line is Terence's recommendation of his poetry as suited to “The dark and cloudy day” and “The embittered hour,” which makes it clear that his soul has already arrived there. If corroboration is wanted, W. J. Swanson has provided it by pointing out—in The Explicator, 39 (1971), item 67—that the line comes almost verbatim from Job XVI, 4 (King James Version).

By what means does what Swanson nicely calls the “prophylactic quality” of Terence's poetry do its work? According to the parable of King Mithridates which ends the poem, it works by a process akin to inoculation: Terence's poetry gives its readers manageable doses of the poisons of “The many-venomed earth” (l. 64), thus developing in them the resistance needed to survive to a ripe age, as the King did, the otherwise destructive amounts that sooner or later are sure to come.

B. J. Leggett has argued persuasively in The Poetic Art of A. E. Housman: Theory and Practice (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 113-41, that this parable comes closer to describing the action of tragic and pessimistic poetry than it may seem to, but I am not here concerned with the truth of Terence's theory in that sense.

Rather, my point—as my reader may have anticipated by now—is that Terence's friend's certainty that “there can't be much amiss” at the very moment that Terence has reached “the embittered hour” is in fact a curious and very pleasing kind of validation of Terence's doctrine—validation, that is, within the fiction of the poem. In the midst of his unspecified trouble, Terence (who of course has had greater exposure to his own poetry than has anyone else) has remained so sociable, so witty, so clearly in emotional and intellectual command of himself (even under criticism), and so able to enjoy the pleasures of food and drink that his friends hadn't even suspected that everything was wrong.

One final matter. The reading that I have been urging enables us also to see that Terence's friend's great confidence in his perceptiveness—“There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear” (my emphasis)—is a satirical thrust by Housman and thus related to the poem's larger didactic purpose. Like many another who sees in literature merely an escape from the realities of our lives, Terence's friend is not only wrong-headed, but delightfully, smugly, certain in his wrong-headedness.