It is strange that no one has thought to define the nature and attitude of Housman's characters: his soldiers, his lovers, his rustics. Such people as Ned and Dick turn out to be merely names of the only character of the poems, the Shropshire lad. Unlike names that are usually associated with a particular novel or poem or drama, there is revealed on the surface only an anonymous person in the ubiquitous lad of the western hills, an anonymity, on closer examination, discovered to be very real. He is essentially the Child, the innocent first confronted with the discovery of knowledge of good and evil, who will not be instructed in the forgetful kingdom of death; he is, to borrow Mr. David Daiches's description, “the melodramatic figure … who passes from inexperience to sorrow, from illusion to bitter disillusion, from content to regret. …” He is at the turning of time, and Housman identifies the origins of his “tears of eternity, and sorrow” at the primal point

When Adam walked in Eden young
          Happy, 'tis writ, was he,
While high the fruit of knowledge hung
          Unbitten on the tree.

(Additional Poems, III)

He is, moreover, a kind of “public man”; he stands for something. As the character in the medieval morality plays, he affects a pose, he has allegorical responsibilities. I take the phrase “public man” from a very provocative distinction which Mr. Arthur Miller makes in an essay on dramatic form in which he sees form as governed by ideas of family or by ideas of society. There are, Mr. Miller writes, private relationships, which are familial and which demand as their form what he calls dramatic realism. As such “the language of the family is the language of the private life—prose.” On the other hand, there are public relationships which are social, and the “language of society, the language of the public life, is verse.” Housman's lad is a kind of public man; the poet stands aloof and frankly tells his reader that he writes of

Tears of eternity, and sorrow,
          Not mine, but man's.

Now it oversimplifies to say that Housman's lad stands for only another fin de siècle manifestation of man against society; he is man in society. He is, to borrow once again from Mr. Miller's sensitive analysis, man away from the family context now confronted with world or social relations. To use Miller's words, this is what he has lost, and this is his problem: “… the memory … of an enfolding family and of childhood …,” a belief that both poet and reader “had once had an identity, a being, somewhere in the past which in the present has lost its completeness, its definitiveness, so that the central force making for pathos … is the paradox which Time bequeaths to us all: we cannot go home again, and the world we live in is an alien place.” The problem becomes: “How may a man make of the outside world a home? How and in what ways must he struggle, what must he strive to change and overcome within himself and outside himself if he is to find the safety, the surroundings of love, the ease of soul, the sense of identity and honor which … all men have connected in their memories with the idea of family?” To state the problem baldly, the whole theme of Housman's poetry—and hence the starting point from which the “lad” must be defined—is the loss of innocence.

That is the land of lost content,
          I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
          And cannot come again.

(A Shropshire Lad, XL)

I have used Mr. Miller's insights into the meanings of dramatic form, for I believe they are valid measurements in reappraising the function and meaning of Housman's melancholy lad. The kind of criticism that regards the characters of the poems as unrealistic, self-pitying, and puerile, as mouthpieces for Housman's limited vision, of one who “kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer,” needs correction and, at least, a more thorough and informed analysis. The temptation is often too alluring to use Housman's own device of the epigram as a device for judging him. It makes for delightful rhetoric, but it is often too pat, too superficial. For example, Mr. Clement Wood protests that for Housman life's vision never goes beyond the youth of twenty:

Why did he never grow up and out of the morbid wisdom of nineteen? The verses have all the beauty … of brainlessness. Perhaps after all this is all beauty: perhaps beauty stops at the threshold of one score.

And again, there is the assertion that Housman must of necessity project his personality into his poetry, a feeling “that in order to transmute his feelings about persons into poetry he had to invent a world, a series of incidents, and a character at once himself and not himself.” The inference is that his own life lacked emotional contacts, and he was forced to supply such persons and occasions from imagination; hence, his creation of an artificial world.

Such judgments may have a degree of validity when the poetry is read as an expression of Romantic despair or as the disillusioned and stoically resigned credo of the miasmic fin-de-siècle cult. The point is, as I have tried to show in a previous essay, that Housman's adoption of a pastoral setting was an intentional device, a pretense of not being conscious of what he was doing. Such a pretense, as Empson pointed out, makes for an unreal quality of the characters, “but not the feelings expressed or the situation described. …” If the device is carried to extremes, it becomes artificial and often merely parody. Housman's poetry has been parodied, of course, but primarily by those who see a clash between style and theme, and who mistake the style for the theme. One who reads the poetry on this level misses the significance of Housman's aim in delineating his lad, and we get such conclusions as “Life never deepens for him [Housman] beyond the vision of his Shropshire lad—a youth who has never seen twenty, as we span it, and never can.” Recognizing the pastoral pose, but seeing it only as artificial, the same writer concludes, “This is at once his crown and his crime. Here are all the conventions of pastoral poetry, worn … as a Joseph's coat.”

On the other hand is the tempting, but not always convincing, effort to insist on an autobiographical explanation of Terence's plight. It would be foolish to deny a personal element in much of the poetry; that would be to deny one of the primary impulses behind all lyric poetry; but to insist that a reading of Housman—and by extension an analysis and definition of his lad, “moping, melancholy mad”—can only be successful in a biographical context is again to miss the more subtle and deeper implications of the character's meaning and function. John Peale Bishop, for example, suggests that “Perfect understanding of his poems depends upon knowledge of his personal plight. …” For him, Housman is all of the characters of A Shropshire Lad. Another writer asserts that it is impossible to read his poetry without recourse to his personality. For him, “Housman's poetry tends to lend itself to confusion between the personality of the poet and the poetry.” The answer, he adds, can be found in a

key which can come only from our knowledge of the poet. This is really an indictment of the poetry, but to Housman it would not have seemed a defect. His own taste in English poetry was plainly a preference for the poetry which might be interpreted as personal statement.

A reading on this level makes for a too specialized and academic an interpretation. It entails a too precious speculation over the psychological and personal motive behind the composition of individual poems. It “romanticizes” the personality of the poet and inspires the statement that his poems “constitute an autobiography that is unequalled for the clarity and the candor with which it reveals the inmost secrets of the heart.” This preoccupation with and probing into the anguished soul of Housman results in a biographical kind of criticism which exploits the poetry for the sake of the poet. But it is the poetry, not the poet, that lives; too much speculation has already gone into exploring the mystery of A. E. H., as if a failure in “Greats” at Oxford could adequately explain

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
          Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
          Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

(Last Poems, IX)

To view the lad of the poetry as only the tragic realization of the poet, or the poetry as self-pitying documents of “a subconscious ‘regression’ desire, a longing for return to the elemental womb,” is to limit the dimensions of his protagonist.

A fairer and more penetrating position is to start from what in the technique of the novel is called point of view. Does the poet adopt an omniscient point of view, standing apart and manipulating his puppets? or does he participate as a first-person narrator, limited by his own involvement in the action? Actually, he would appear to do both, as the remainder of this study will indicate.

The point here, however, is that Housman reveals himself as a modern melancholy Jacques, restlessly active in his own Forest of Arden, moralizing, not only on the stages of life, but on the peculiar freedom and honesty of the Fool. Sucking melancholy as a weasel sucks eggs, he can passionately exclaim, “Motley's the only wear!” In this guise, the poet can both experience and comment; the reader is never quite sure whether the “I” of the poems is Housman, or, as is more likely, the character of the Shropshire lad speaking in the first person. This distinction, however, ought to be made: the character inevitably assumes a dual role, one that is sophisticated, knowledgeable, and reflective and one that is innocent, rustic: the lad of the poems. That is why the role of a kind of modern Jacques partially explains Housman's attitude towards his characters; he can stand aside and comment on the activities of his Shropshire world, or he can assume the role of the fool and rustics.

Housman thus achieves through his character the pose of the public man, the man confronted with the struggle of searching for being in an alien world, man face to face with social forces. The irony that becomes pointed and felt is the mask assumed and called “Shropshire lad”; in the safety of the fold he can utter the truth; he can by a kind of retrospect point to the world outside the family. The character has a wisdom that is beyond him; he can speak the truth and escape the consequences. If Jacques was enamored of Touchstone, Housman envied his Shropshire lad. The poet even goes so far as to admit his condition:

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 Shropshire Lad, XV)

If, as Yeats says, “There is always a face behind the mask,” then the personality of Housman lurks behind the pastoral and philosophic pose of his character. There is always the very strong feeling that he is looking the reader straight in the eye, but, as he warns, most receive back only a reflection of themselves; if they look deeper they will see griefs that grieve and read the poet's warning, “Not mine, but man's.” One writer, who insists that a great many of the poems are autobiographical, remarks that Housman “is at his best where he drops the mask.” But Housman never drops the mask; he is never the Cambridge don; he stands before the public, an artist, and, as Ransom would say about Milton's pastoral mask, he “bears the character of a qualified spokesman, and a male.” This is what gives the character dramatic force; only on such a basis can Housman's protagonist be defined and interpreted. The important thing to remember is that Housman, the man, never comes between the character and the reader; as a poet he assumes the mask and in this way achieves a double perspective; he can adopt the wisdom of experience and at the same time describe experience at the threshold of discovery. For Housman it is something like this and acts as prolegomenon to the poetry and to the lad:

He, standing hushed, a pace or two apart,
          Among the bluebells of the listless plain,
Thinks, and remembers how he cleansed his heart
          And washed his hands in innocence in vain.

(More Poems, XXVIII)

Enough has been said to indicate the extent and degree of the nature and attitude of Housman's rustic lad. In one sense he is more complex than most commentators would allow; in another, more impersonal, less complicated, than the biographical critics would insist on. Two questions remain: (1) Why did Housman select a rustic or yokel as protagonist of the poems? and (2) What is the final poetic and dramatic function of the character? The suggested answers to these two questions are concerned with the reader's response to all of the poetry; some individual poems do not fit into the setting and analysis of the lad or of the pastoral background.

The important point is that there is a “lad” and that he exists in the poems. Immaterial to the matter at hand, but as a point of statistics, the word “lad” occurs sixty-seven times in the sixty-three poems of A Shropshire Lad. The Cambridge don created him because he needed the anonymity and because he was an ironist. He needed the character of innocence, as Mark Twain needed Huck Finn, to define a sense of moral responsibility: he had to go back to the beginning, where his perspective would not be warped by a world in which respectability stood for religion and avarice stood for achievement.

A great deal of inconclusive speculation could go into, and has gone into, defining Housman's character in terms of the poet's own personal aloofness and shyness, explaining that this personal attitude accounts for the unreality of the lad and for the artificiality of the setting and situations. Kronenberger, in an essay written soon after Housman's death, implies something of this nature in defining the poet's style:

His aloofness was, of course, a condition of temperament and persisted long enough to harden into a condition of mind. … He had a severe, or at any rate a fastidious, taste, which means that he would have protested against most of life because it seemed contaminating before he would have protested against most of life because it seemed unsound.

As a result, Kronenberger adds, “His rejection of first-hand living must finally be set down to too much aesthetic sensibility, to a kind of squeamishness.”

Much of the commentary on the poetry concentrates on the so-called eccentricity of the poet in an effort to explain the nature of his setting, themes, and characters; the general conclusion argues that the poet refuses to face reality, insists on a rejection of life. Edmund Wilson, for example, would see in Housman's pose a kind of monastic other-worldliness that is the result of a long university background which crystallizes in a brittle asceticism and a lack of emotional development. Wilson notes the same development in T. E. Lawrence and remarks that both “had been led by their extreme sensibility to assume in the presence of their fellows eccentric or repellent masks. Both had been led by extreme ambition to perform exploits which did not do them justice, exploits which their hearts were but half in. …”

Such conclusions imply that the situations and the characters of the poems are melodramatic and contrived. On the surface, such views have a persuasive validity, but they do not explain adequately why Housman selected the rustic, or, as this study insists, the innocent, as his spokesman. There is no “simple” answer; to insist on the pun is to include the observation of Louis MacNeice, who remarks that “It is a mistake to think of [Housman] as a ‘simple’ poet; the simplicity is often bluff; his very directness, like his regular music, is ironic.” For Housman, it would seem, there was the need to rely on the simple as a form of deception, for only in this way could the irony be presented and felt. This view of the character helps to vindicate the poet and his lad from the charges of sentimentality and self-pity and prevents an exclusive reading of the poetry as personal and biographical.

No one can say finally why Housman selected the rustic; he left nothing to indicate positively what his motives were; but an understanding of the function and poetic effect of the protagonist can be inferred from the poetry itself. The question is significant and has its origins in a closely related question about Housman himself. But chief concern here is not with the strange personality of the poet, although that would have its importance to a biographer; but, as a dramatic and poetic device, it is tantalizing to discover that Housman in real life was the antithesis of his young man.

During the few years when most of the poems were written he was an established professor of Latin, a self-appointed arbiter of the texts of classical authors, a meticulous and fastidious scholar who was to devote years to the editing of a minor Roman poet, an aloof and apparently unsympathetic dweller in the cities of men, an ambitious and dignified English don. Why invent the “Shropshire lad”? Perhaps one is in danger of worrying overmuch about psychological theories or the projection of personality, about which it has been well stated in another place concerning the tendency to think of so much literature as the projection of personality that “the temptation to speculate about the human source of poetry is well-nigh irresistible.” Laurence Housman has written that “AEH invented the ‘Shropshire Lad’ as a vehicle for saying what he wanted to say about life in general and sex-love in particular, without giving himself away in actual self-identity.” But one useful approach, which is attempted here, is to try to determine something of the poetic and dramatic function of the Shropshire lad in the poetry.

The lad is variously the soldier, the lover, the “young sinner,” and the rustic observer or commentator on life. In any of the roles, he is almost invariably characterized by his ingenuousness in the grip of a strong emotion, by what is often defined as on the threshold of discovery. He is awkward, but straightforward in his actions, and always the process of discovery results in a revelation of some kind. The conflict that becomes dramatized in the action, and in his own mind, is the conflict between the actual and ideal, the world of being and the world of becoming; what Mr. Cleanth Brooks has described as “The world of ‘Presences’ that are absolute and do not change, and the world of becoming which passes from birth to decay and death.” The human plight, and hence the dilemma of the poet, is that man has no choice, and the ironic revelation is that he must choose. As Brooks perceives, “Man cannot be man without his ideals even though he can never fully achieve them and is thus condemned to be bruised by them.” Housman's lad is almost always involved in the discovery of this predicament; it is the anguish of ambivalence, and slowly he perceives that he has chosen to leave the world of light for the world of darkness. This is his plight, and, assuming the role of anonymous commentator or choral response, he answers in a platitude, angry and almost petulant:

And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.

(Last Poems, XII)

Whatever the situation or role of the lad, there is a special urgency, a feeling of immediacy, in a search for meaning. Whether the soldier, the lover, or the young sinner, there is always the situation of having lost, of a meaningless end which becomes a losing of self, in which the futility of the act results in an act of meaning. That is, as if beyond the meaninglessness, meaning has finally been found. Inherent in the discovery is a rejection of an easy optimism and a keen awareness of the cyclic movement of man's march from birth to death and of man's vanity in his achievement. In the poem entitled “Revolution,” a poem that Housman himself referred to as a modern parable, there is the statement of the enigma which startles into realization that in the beginning of hope and promise through self-fulfilment there is at the same moment the paradoxical realization of the beginning of decline and decay.

West and away the wheels of darkness roll,
          Day's beamy banner up the east is borne,
Spectres and fears, the nightmare and her foal,
          Drown in the golden deluge of the morn.
But over sea and continent from sight
          Safe to the Indies has the earth conveyed
The vast and moon-eclipsing cone of night,
          Her towering foolscap of eternal shade.
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.

(Last Poems, XXXVI)

The title signifies cyclic movement. One critic in a brief but effective analysis of the poem suggests that it is a commentary on the illusion of progress. “The ‘cone of night’ … is called ‘moon-eclipsing’ because it extinguishes the romantic hopes of mankind, and a ‘foolscap’ because it fits the earth as a dunce's cap fits the head of a man, who is fool enough to believe in progress.” The poem helps also to define more generally the uneasy and precarious point of discovery, which is the peculiar plight of Housman's lad: it underlines the startled discovery of the discrepancy between the actual and the ideal, a discovery which results in a willing abandonment to the inevitable completion of the cycle, when, at the moment of fulfilment, “the subterranean dark / Has crossed the nadir, and begins to climb.” The stoic response of the lad is always complete; he stands for a type of martyrdom, not of the kind which is a “cultivation of self,” but of the type of martyrdom which Mr. Miller calls “victorious,” a type which becomes “the martyrization of the self, not for the sake of another, or as a rebuke to another … but for the sake of martyrdom, of the disinterested action whose ultimate model was … Jesus Christ.” Even the most casual reading of the poetry can show this confrontation. Because of its ironic condition, the lad is seen to have larger meaning, a symbolic force. In the final analysis Housman is presenting an attitude that is neither jejune nor artificial, that reflects a deep and sensitive awareness of man's mystery, which, to be honest, must be presented in terms of restraint, economy, and humility.

This attitude achieves its poetic effect by a scrupulous attention to form and technique; an impure artist exploits his personality at the expense of his reader. A great deal of Housman's success in achieving an effortlessness in technique is due to his use of the lad, the rustic innocent who is not quite real but who in his rustic guise gives greater dramatic effect to the poet's theme of man's inescapable mortality. By involving the character in various situations of death and defeat, the poet dramatizes a corollary theme, that failure is the only condition for understanding. For this purpose, Housman almost always places his lad in moments of defeat which are either romantic or heroic, the young lover deceived in love, the soldier dying in a foreign land, the sinner whose end is a gallows tree; in this way the poet makes the situation and the lad seem unreal, frees them of a kind of legendary quality of happenings somewhere else a long time ago, so that the effect is one of revealing the pathos in terms of understatement.

The poetic result is symbolic; the reader can feel in these “romantic” defeats and failures the larger stage of his own lesser defeats, his own failure to achieve fulfilment, and, more pointedly, his own inability to return to the elusive state of innocence. As the “innocent,” the lad can look two ways: to his own oneness and self-identification and at the same time to the emerging disunity and diffusement in the social world. The conflict, or tension, comes in the effort to maintain a “perilous balance”—an equilibrium of knowing and pretending not to know. The denouement comes in the ultimate action, which is for Housman an action of perhaps heroic proportions, in the willingness to accept death as fulfilment rather than as escape, or ignominious finality.

If the theme of the response of innocence to experience and to action is the right one, it helps to place the Shropshire lad in a more dramatic position; his effect on the reader is more than a “literary” example of childish petulance and rebellion against society. We have only to turn to the poetry, to point out specific situations, to perceive that the “lad” of the poems, whether soldier, lover, or sinner, is himself a discoverer. Almost always Housman presents him at the moment when reality is made apparent, forever after which he must, like Mithridates, “sample all the killing store,” and forever after which he knows that “happiness” and “pleasure” are illusions, that life, while perhaps not a sham, is something of a hoax, and that meaning comes only through struggle. As the soldier he knows, instinctively it would seem, that

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, I will rise.

(A Shropshire Lad, XXXV)

As the “lad” he is committed to the selfless action whose meaning he finds in “homely comforters” who “Shared their short-lived comrade's pain”; he feels his affinity for nature's martyrdom of the disinterested action, the poignancy of “The beautiful and death-struck year”; looking beyond, he sees

          Yonder, lightening other loads,
The seasons range the country roads,
But here in London streets I ken
No such helpmates, only men;
And these are not in plight to bear,
If they would, another's care.”

(A Shropshire Lad, XLI)

Housman's soldier-lad is involved in a different kind of battle, a war which Mr. Randall Jarrell, writing on John Crowe Ransom's poetry, describes as the war going on in the world between the practical and “efficient followers of abstraction and ideals, men who have learned that when you know how to use something you know it” and the other army, “defeated every day and victorious every night, of so-lightly-armed, so-easily vanquished skirmishers, in their rags and tags and trailing clouds,” who are “all above or below or at the side of the Real World. …” This is the other army in which Housman's lad enlists, and over his cup of ale he sings, half-mockingly:

I 'listed at home for a lancer,
          Oh who would not sleep with the brave?
I 'listed at home for a lancer
          To ride on a horse to my grave
And over the seas we were bidden
          A country to take and to keep;
And far with the brave I have ridden,
          And now with the brave I shall sleep.

(Last Poems, VI)

This is the army in which, Jarrell writes, all is magical: “disenchantment and enchantment are so prettily and inextricably mingled that we accept everything with sad pleasure, and smile at the poems' foreknowing, foredefeated, mocking, half-acceptant pain.”

There is also the other Child, the lover, whose knowledge comes through death or loss, who, like Marvell's lover, aware of the inevitability of death and decay, aware of the ambiguity of honor and love, accepts the moment of fulfilment as the only reality. Time becomes the moment, for even while the “chestnut casts his flambeaux,” the month of May has come full cycle and

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
          One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
          Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

(Last Poems, IX)

But Housman's lover is not sophisticated; sex for him is not a parlor game to be played out in pretty compliments. He carries with him a tough strain of melancholy; once he commits himself wholly, he soon perceives the transitory nature of love and the pain of passion. Sex is creative but frustrated, given the conditions of human depravity and the contrast between the actual and the ideal. The effect is found in the almost ludicrous situations of lovers speaking from the grave, of love never being fulfilled, or, if consummated, realized as a death wish. There is an unreal quality about the nature of sex as if it were a fragile thing, better felt than expressed because of its violence when exposed. Housman's lovers either turn away from each other in a humorous and witty understanding of the fickleness of physical love, as in

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.

(A Shropshire Lad, XVIII)

or, in mock solemnity, comment on the impermanence of love, as in

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.

(Last Poems, XXIII)

or else, they suffer, often violently; for the search for permanence in a world of flux leads to the ultimate action, and ironically the “true” lover, in order to maintain the meaning of the moment, knowing that he cannot make his sun stand still, courts death as the only constant lover whose embrace is complete:

‘When I from hence away am past
          I shall not find a bride,
And you shall be the first and last
          I ever lay beside.’

(A Shropshire Lad, LIII)

In the presence of absolutes, meaning is found in repose:

And low is the roof, but it covers
          A sleeper content to repose;
And far from his friends and his lovers
          He lies with the sweetheart he chose.

(Last Poems, IV)

Mr. Edmund Wilson finds Housman's lover incomplete in that there “is no natural progress in the experience of human relationships.” Like Lewis Carroll's Alice and Pater's Marius, these people are, for Mr. Wilson, “all the beings of a looking-glass world, either sexless or with an unreal sex which reads from right to left instead of from left to right.” I am not sure what is meant by the last clause of Mr. Wilson's sentence, although I do not think that he implies an unnatural quality in the lover's attitude toward sex; the sexless quality he finds is perhaps more accurate, for it more nearly describes the innocent: once he is committed to the full experience and the physical knowledge, he is no longer the Child; that is why violence occurs as he moves out of the true light into the world of shadows. The contrast is everywhere between the world of the real and the world of shadows, between appearance and reality; the lover—and the Child—is always at that point of discovering that meaning and understanding commits him to the world of shadows and the beginning of the loss of his happy estate. Housman himself might call the experience the “bridge of sighs,” the paradox of maturity, the discovery that

Light was the air beneath the sky
But dark under the shade.

(A Shropshire Lad, LIII)

Finally, the character of the Shropshire lad is read with more understanding and with more meaning if he is defined in terms of symbolic reference, and if he is read in terms which reflect, not Housman's personality, but Housman's analysis in lyric terms of man's search for identity in a world he never made, of “the troubles of our proud and angry race,” which are, nevertheless, “not mine, but man's.” The “lad” is the symbol of the precarious yet certain progress of man from youth to maturity, in which always inheres the nostalgic yearning for the simplicity of the past, for the days

When first my way to fair I took
          Few pence in purse had I,
And long I used to stand and look
          At things I could not buy.
Now times are altered: if I care
          To buy a thing, I can;
The pence are here and here's the fair,
          But where's the lost young man?
—To think that two and two are four
          And neither five nor three
The heart of man has long been sore
          And long 'tis like to be.

(Last Poems, XXXV)

He is also for Housman the symbol of the tension between the actual and the ideal, of the search for being in an alien world, tortured by the compulsive need for self-identity. As the rustic, and placed in the romantic setting of Shropshire, we are more likely to accept the reality of his plight, for the very reason that the complex world is viewed from the simple. The effect of the characterization is sometimes ludicrous, and the style can lead to parody if the artificial quality is carried to extremes. As a result, the character may seem unreal, but not the feelings expressed. By maintaining a pretense of not being conscious of what he is doing, Housman is able to achieve in the characterization the disturbing consciousness of reality. The conflict as it emerges becomes a kind of battle between youth and old age, or innocence on the threshold of its discovery of good and evil, in which the youth “whose heart is right,” who is aware that salvation has as its condition the martyrization of self, can silently submit to the inevitable force of change with this ironic consolation, whispered by the sage to the young man:

Well is thy war begun;
          Endure, be strong and strive;
But think not, O my son,
          To save thy soul alive.

(More Poems, IV)

The finished character, then, has dimension; his seriousness often appears ludicrous, his levity often intense. There is an unreal, other-world quality surrounding him, but he has responsibilities that are tremendous; he is the symbol of man's first great discovery of the nature of being; and he is scrupulously honest, so much so that the poet must make him unreal and in a tone of ironic levity tease us into the discovery that progress is illusion and that man “wast not born for aye.” Even the Cosmos shepherds the sheep of mortality:

Stars, I have seen them fall,
          But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
          From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
          Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
          And still the sea is salt.

(More Poems, VII)

The Shropshire “lad” is of Housman's own making, but he is not an autobiographic portrait of the poet. As protagonist for Housman's theme, he can dramatize the poet's own personal seriousness by an innocence that is inviolable.

Note

1. Henry Holt and Company have kindly given permission to quote from the poems.