This essay addresses itself to what I have called Housman's two “strategies”—two ways of responding to the situation of the homosexual through the means of his art. I identify one of these strategies with each of his volumes of poetry. The first, which I call the “strategy of survival,” is the strategy of A Shropshire Lad; the second, which I call the “strategy of revolt,” is the strategy of Last Poems. Although much Housman criticism treats his work as a single body, frequently even lumping all the poems into the modes of A Shropshire Lad, the two volumes represent very different strategies and forms of presentation of self.

I

Asked about his use of place, A. E. Housman replied drily, “My Shropshire, like the Cambridge of Lycidas, is not exactly a real place.”¹ The remark is suggestive in several ways. It serves to remind us of A Shropshire Lad's status as fiction, its qualities of invention and imagination as ways of transforming experience into art. If the “Shropshire” of the poem is not really Shropshire, neither is the speaker of most of the poems, Terence Hearsay, Housman himself. At the same time Housman's comment seems to invite us to read A Shropshire Lad at least partly in the light of Milton's monody. To do so is to understand much of the structure of Housman's work, the transformation of the “uncouth swain” into the “lad” of the later poem, but also to see how Lycidas, with its Christian reassurance, becomes an ironic model for Housman's Stoic or antitheist elegy.²

In the popular imagination the poems of A Shropshire Lad are often seen as pastoral lyrics singing the praises of innocent rural life and the loves of lads and lasses. In fact, however, the book is a series of dramatic monologues depicting a fallen pastoral. The world they portray is as cruel as Frost's rural New England—Frost is in fact one of Housman's most important spiritual and poetic descendants. The speaker gives us a panoramic view of Shropshire as a world dominated by guilt and death. And yet, paradoxically, the poems triumph over the world they record: the lads die, but the love they inspire gives rise to the poems which preserve that love in a way that life is incapable of. A Shropshire Lad is a book which begins in death and concludes in an eternal life of shared art and love.

A Shropshire Lad was indeed a deeply personal work, the poetic consequence of Housman's love for Moses Jackson and his recognition of the impossibility of fulfilling that love in life. Housman found an adequate means of rendering his love only through the effective exclusion of the personal self from the poems. Housman's invention of a rural uncouth persona was not merely an indication of his indebtedness to a poetic tradition; it was the means by which he could make his suffering into the material of art and hence surmount it. The Shropshire lad is Housman's objective correlative for his own sense of loss.

This process, which I have termed Housman's “strategy of survival,” is most clearly indicated in the penultimate poem of the collection, the only one in which the speaker is specifically identified as Terence. Terence replies to accusations that his poetry (which we have just read, of course) is “stupid stuff” by explaining that his poems are not merely “a tune to dance to.” If poetry is an escape from thought, then its place can well be taken by ale. But, following the liquor analogy, his brew is “sour,” for it has been distilled “in a weary land,” “Out of a stem that scored the hand.”³ In his first explanation of his poetry, the speaker appears to justify it in terms of reality: if his poetry is grim, it is because life is grim as well (it has, in his words, “much less good than ill”).

The fourth stanza of the poem introduces a new argument, through the story of Mithridates, who uses small doses of poison to develop an immunity to it. The pain of the poems is also mithridatic; it is designed to introduce a controlled amount of pain in order that the reader may be inured against an even larger dose. By this analogy, Housman reveals his own strategy of control and distance. The king survives because he has trained his body to respond to poison; the knowledge of poison has made him strong. So, we are to understand, it is with these poems: they are also ways of learning to survive, not through escape from pain but through the ability to take the pain in small doses. As therapy for the reader, they build an immunity that may enable him to overcome adversity; as therapy for the author, they are an index of the ability of pain to heal itself, by a kind of burning-out process.

It should be remembered that the speaker in this poem is Terence—but Terence in his guise as poet, even if still the unsophisticated poet of Ludlow. The poem is thus Terence's poetics, or Housman's poetics as spoken through Terence. For Terence is integral precisely to the strategy that Housman describes in this poem. It was through the creation of a less sophisticated, cruder self that Housman could give voice to his pain while still retaining an element of control. The shepherd's lament became Housman's way of channeling, and hence mastering, his own mourning.⁴ Those who met Housman were often surprised to find such an unsympathetic, cold person, not at all like the warm-hearted voice of the poems. What they seem not to have understood is the extraordinary inner tension that led to the creation of two different public identities, the cruelly correct classics scholar, and the lively, vulgar lad. Housman seems to have had no way of bringing them together.

The Mithridates poem bears great weight, but it is not the last poem in the collection. For a final work, following his poetic justification, Housman wrote a kind of envoi, for which he returned to his characteristic ballad (or hymn) meter. “I hoed and trenched and weeded” no longer justifies the poetic method, but accepts simultaneously its unfashionable quality and its ultimate survival. As the opening line makes clear, the speaker is still very much a rural figure, but his personality is no longer at issue. Here it is the horticultural metaphor itself which is central. For the poems are flowers which go unsold at the fair, since their “hue” is “not the wear.”⁵

Since they are flowers, they also contain the means of their own continuation. The poet sows their seeds so that they may flower again another year. By this capacity for regeneration, they are able to survive the poet himself. In miniature form (four quatrains of common meter), the poet thus presents an account of his own life and art. The speaker makes an offering of his love and labor, but it goes “unheeded.” He then “sows” the seeds of his first offering, which is to say, he creates the poems that are the product, or seed, of the love once proffered and refused. That seed will yield new flowers and come to adorn “other luckless lads.” It is important to note here that in this poem, more than any other of this collection, Housman is open about the homosexual meanings of his heritage: the flowers that he sows are to be worn by other lads. In that way his own love, so hopeless and so painful, becomes a source of hope and comfort. For the love, once transformed into art, is able to transcend time and prejudice until it finds its rightful place.

The analogy of the sower and the seed echoes, especially in lines 9 and 10, “Some seed the birds devour, / And some the season mars,” the Gospel of St. Matthew, 13, where Jesus explains his own method of speaking in parables. The allusion thus functions two ways: it signals Housman's transformation of his source and his use of his poems as an analogue to the Word; it also signals to us Housman's own parabolic method. The poem is not realistic; instead it translates the poet's work into the language of the country and then by revealing its source back into its origins as a parable about the survival of language. Like the Whitman of the “Calamus” poems, which seem remarkably close to this poem, the speaker concludes by withdrawing, leaving only his work, seen as flower seed or leaf of grass, behind. Nature subsumes the artist and preserves his creation until a time when it may find response. Housman's work is therefore a parable, not only in the obvious sense that the flowers here are a metaphor, but in the sense that it is cast as a message in a secret tongue. The male love which gave rise to the poems would survive in them until it could flower again.

The idea that art preserves by transforming love from the transitory realm of the real into the eternal world of the imagination was not unique to Housman, of course, although it is one of his most persistent themes. There is perhaps no more important source for this concept as expressed in Housman's poetry than in Shakespeare's sonnets, such as sonnet 18, with its lines,

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou growest:
          So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
          So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Housman's most famous single poem, “To an Athlete Dying Young,” is one of a number of his poems which touch on this theme. It must be remembered that the poem is based on Pindar's Olympian Odes and that, like them, it celebrates the beauty and grace of the athlete at the moment of his perfection. It is therefore inaccurate to think of Housman's elegaic poems in terms of the world-weariness and amour de l'impossible of the poets of the '90s: for their mourning is always countered by an assurance of a compensating life, never certainly in the Christian terms of Lycidas but often in the aesthetic terms of Shakespeare.

“To an Athlete Dying Young” is structured around the figure of the laurel, which, as Housman knew, was used for the wreath of the victorious athlete and for the poet. Although the laurel in the poem refers explicitly only to the athlete's crown, the poem's full meaning depends upon an understanding of its unstated other reference. For the poem itself is the laurel wreath bestowed on the young man, and it is the wreath which guarantees a life beyond death. In the third stanza, the speaker praises the youth:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

In the natural world, indicated by the “fields where glory does not stay,” nothing is permanent, all life leads to death. The laurel grows “early” because the beauty of the youth achieves its peak, according to the Greek ideal of beauty, in late adolescence. But that beauty dies equally quickly, and indeed “withers quicker than the rose,” the emblem of feminine beauty as well as of short flowering.

The final stanza returns to the figure of the laurel, now transformed from an emblem of early death into one of permanent life:

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

The irony of this transformation, that this garland which is “briefer than a girl's” should be still “unwithered,” is the poet's assertion of the permanence of art (and memory). For although the athlete is presumably dead, he is always imagined in the poem's terms as alive (indeed the title sees him only “dying,” not dead): the imperatives of stanza 6 “set” and “hold” suggest his continued activity, while it is the others who are now “the strengthless dead.” He remains alive because he wears a laurel that will not wither, a garland of words, in fact the very poem we are now reading and in that act gazing once more on that “early-laurelled head.” Thus the poem's last line, “The garland briefer than a girl's,” accomplishes an ironic triumph, since its very brevity is what enables it to survive; so too the line suggests the love for a young man, although destined for an early death, prevails over death in a way that the rose garland of heterosexual love cannot. Like most pederastic poems of this period, Housman's “To an Athlete Dying Young” suggests that it is the purity of boy-love which preserves it from time and mortality.⁶

Although “To an Athlete” does not explicitly identify the garland of the last line as a trope for the poem, there can be no doubt that this was Housman's intention, for he used the same figure in a closely related poem, A Shropshire Lad 44, “Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?” There can be few readers who are not moved by this expression of self-hatred. Did Housman really prefer death before “dishonour”? The poem poses many problems, not the least of which is its tone. It seems certain that the young cadet (about whose suicide Housman had read) aroused a sentiment similar to that which the athlete produced. Reading of this young man and his death, Housman chose to preserve him from the anonymity of time by transforming him from pathetic victim to hero. Thus much of what the poem accomplishes is subversive: a suicide is praised as if he were a military hero (he is “brave,” “wise,” and “right”), and his death becomes the means of new life. For it is the poet's act of love, his response to the unknown cadet, that creates the laurel of the last stanza:

And here, man, here's the wreath I've made:
'Tis not a gift that's worth the taking,
But wear it and it will not fade.

By incorporating the cadet into his poems, Housman preserves his memory, and makes his act a permanent presence, but as an act of heroism and not an act of cowardice. Seen from the perspective of Housman's time (the cadet's suicide and Housman's probable composition of the poem took place less than three months after the conviction of Oscar Wilde), the poem is an attempt to redefine bravery by making a gesture of love. Although Housman in 1895 was perhaps incapable of imagining a homosexual life, he was capable of recognizing his own obligation to preserve the memory of those who died for their sexuality, in the hope that his wreath might last “unwithered” to another age where it might give hope to other “luckless lads.” The composition of such a poem seems to be another element in the “strategy of survival”: by dramatizing the death of the cadet, Housman freed himself from death. His mission was clear: it was left to him to write the works that could preserve the memory of those who could not speak (as Whitman put it in “Song of Myself,” “I act as the tongue of you, / Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosened”).

II

If the fundamental strategy of A Shropshire Lad is the attempt to overcome pain by controlling it, Housman's second (and final) collection of poems, Last Poems, proposes a very different strategy. These are poems of rebellion, poems that clearly affirm life over death. For whatever reason, Housman appears no longer to have found necessary the strategies that made A Shropshire Lad possible. Most of the poems appear still to be written in the voice of Terence (although there are striking exceptions such as the “Epithalamium,” which Housman wrote for Moses Jackson's wedding), but the dominant elegiac tone is gone. Indeed the first poem sets the tone for the volume by insisting on a refusal of death. Housman was in his 60's when the book was published, and so one might have anticipated poems which looked toward the end. Instead the book is dominated by its carpe diem theme; the presence of death makes life all the more valuable. In the initial poem, “The West,” the speaker acknowledges the appeal of death, troped variously as the West, the sea, and “our native land.” If there is still no reason to deny that all life will terminate in death, yet there is no reason to succumb to its beguilements. The reason for the change is clear in the poem: the presence of the comrade who “stride for stride, / Paces silent at my side.” The word “lad” is used twice in the poem, both times in association with the desire for death, while the living figure is referred to four times as “comrade.” The use of these terms in this way appears to signal a shift from the pederastic mode to the Whitmanic mode. There is a strong sense of a newfound equality that matches the determination to accept life, to “Plant your heel on earth and stand.” Since death will mean an end to love, the call of the poems is to life:

When you and I are spilt on air
Long we shall be strangers there;
Friends of flesh and bone are best:
Comrade, look not on the West.

Although Last Poems still makes use of the mithridatic theory, as in these lines from the second poem of the collection, “So here are things to think on / That ought to make me brave,” the consolation of the poems is no longer sought exclusively in art, and the sufferers begin to respond to their suffering. This poem, for instance, begins, “As I gird on for fighting,” and the military metaphor runs throughout the volume. The third poem imagines a direct act of revolt: confronted with Hecate, the “Queen of air and darkness,” the speaker replies to her threat, “I shall die tomorrow; / But you will die to-day.” Last Poems indicates Housman's determination to kill the demons of darkness. While recognizing the inevitability of human suffering and death, they are nonetheless poems of assertion in which life is valued for itself.

One of the best known poems from this collection, “The chestnut casts his flambeaux,” is indicative of the change in attitude. The poem's sense of loss through time is carefully controlled by the ironic voice. His plaints may be those of a slightly drunk Terence, but the anger is now present along with the self-pity, particularly in the curse against “Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.” It is a cry like that in Atalanta in Calydon, against a malevolent god. Shorn of hope for an afterlife, man in these poems has only the possibility of assuming human responsibilities, those which require him to do his work as best he can. The Stoic philosophy of the poem is slightly undercut by the final phrase, “and drink your ale,” but it remains nonetheless essential to Housman's attempt to delineate a world without god. He seeks no consolations, but indeed uses the confrontation with evil and absence as the occasion for spiritual growth. Man is, as poem 12 puts it, “a stranger and afraid / In a world [he] never made.”

Although Housman's rejection of Christianity appears to have occurred fairly early in his life (it became final around 1880-1881) and although it is in any case not unlike that of Swinburne in its angry phase or Arnold in its milder moments, in this particular poem Housman seems to draw a connection between his “criminality” and his atheism. It is important to recall the crimes and criminals of A Shropshire Lad, and to suggest that they may be, more than realistic portrayal, the metaphor for Housman's own situation as a sexual criminal, an awareness heightened for him, of course, by the Wilde trial. In the earlier volume the representation of his own sexuality as crime remained at the level of metaphor; it requires a knowledge of biography to guess that Maurice's murderer in A Shropshire Lad 8 may represent to some extent Housman's own outlawed status as a homosexual. In Last Poems, however, the feelings of anger are much closer to the surface. “Let them mind their own affairs,” the speaker declares, or “look the other way.”

But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.

The poem effectively dramatizes the mingling of religious and civil sanctions, all in the name of a superficial conformity on a matter that is none of “their” affair. By choosing the metaphor of the dance, Housman emphasizes the triviality of the difference and the sense of disproportion between the “crime” and the punishment. At the same time, the metaphor of the “stranger” and the “foreign laws” suggests the depth of Housman's alienation and his recognition that he would always live in a world that he could never be fully a part of.

The most significant manifestation of the “revolutionary” Housman is “Hell Gate,” in which he turns again to the model of Milton; but the Milton called upon here is not the pastoral elegist of Lycidas but the epic poet of Paradise Lost—and that poem is reimagined in a Romantic way. The speaker reaches Hell, only to find that the sentry guarding the gate is an old soldier friend named Ned. Greeting his old friend, the sentry is now transformed into a “flaming mutineer” who kills the master of Hell, and the act of cosmic rebellion leaves the two friends alone, about to begin “the backward way.” The expulsion from the Garden becomes the escape from Hell, the revolt against God becomes the revolt against Satan, and the original couple, Adam and Eve, are radically recast as a “pair of friends.” The poem is astonishing in its vision of human rebellion against an unjust world. That injustice is no longer some vague notion of Fate, but is, in this collection of poems, specifically seen as the attempt by God and man to impose “foreign laws” to make men “dance as they desire.” The poem's role as a trope of homosexual revolt is seen not only in the final emblem of the two friends, but also in the repeated references to the “plain,” recalling the Cities of the Plain, and the reference to the moment when the two rebels “looked back,” recalling Lot's wife. “There was,” however, the poem concludes, “no pursuit.” It has been argued the poem is the only one to achieve a “return to the pastoral world” and deals with “the redemption of the fallen world by the innocent world of the past.”⁷ Although the friends go back, it is back from death to life, not from experience to innocence. There is no suggestion that the pastoral can be restored. The sentry may be an old friend from Shropshire, as it were, but he is a far different figure from the lads of the earlier book. “Hell Gate” is the poem in which Housman imagines that love may conquer death, that man need not accept the fear of damnation, and that evil is vanquished by a transformation of the lad into “the soldier at my side.” It is Housman's vision of a triumphant humanity, joined by what Whitman would have called “manly love.”

After such a vision, it is hard to imagine that Housman would have returned to the modes of the earlier poems, and indeed he does not. The volume's last poem is called “Fancy's Knell,” and it confirms the recognition that death must lead us to life, even more than to art. Unlike the poems of the earlier volume, there is no assurance here that art will survive:

Away we both must hie,
To air the ditty,
And to earth I.

The death of both the individual and the art that he creates leads Housman to a celebration of life, “learn the dances / And praise the tune to-day.” Terence refused the call for a dance tune in the penultimate poem of A Shropshire Lad; the speaker's concluding image of himself as the flautist in Last Poems suggests the distance that has been travelled. Evil is no longer administered as antidote to even greater evil; instead it is confronted and vanquished. In that sense only is the pastoral recaptured at the end of Last Poems. The pipes of Pan call forth a new, invigorated, and sensual music that arises from experience while still retaining the vigor of innocence. No longer seeking strategies of survival through distance from the self, Housman left as his Last Poems a new strategy of anger, rebellion, and the joy that might come if only Hell were vanquished.

Notes

1. B. J. Leggett, Housman's Land of Lost Content: A Critical Study of A Shropshire Lad (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1970), p. 92, quoting from Cyril Clemens, “Some Unpublished Housman Letters,” Poet Lore 53 (1947), 262.

2. Housman's “A Winter Funeral” is the best example of this.

3. This line seems to have had an influence on Hardy: see 1. 5 of “The Darkling Thrush,” written in 1900.

4. The importance of the persona is discussed by B. J. Leggett, The Poetic Art of A. E. Housman: Theory and Practice (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 49. But he carefully avoids any connections to Housman's life: whatever the “private compulsions,” he argues, the “poet's own emotional life, however fascinating, is at present beyond the range of criticism” (p. 53). This attitude is typical of Housman criticism: F. W. Bateson writes, for instance, “a critic's first concern is with the poems as poems and not with the neuroses of his poet” (“The Poetry of Emphasis,” in Christopher Ricks, ed., A. E. Housman: A Collection of Critical Essays [Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968], p. 131.) No one seems to consider the possibility that the “private” life will be given shape in the art.

5. The choice of the color metaphor is interesting, especially in connection with Housman's poem, unpublished during his lifetime, on the Wilde trial, “Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?” in which it is the “colour of his hair” that leads to the sentence of hard labor. It may be linked to the persistent association of certain colors with homosexuality, such as yellow, green, or lavender. The Wilde poem is discussed by Joseph Cady, “Housman and the Struggle for a Homosexual Voice,” unpublished paper delivered at MLA, 1976.

6. I have discussed Housman's relationship to Santayana briefly in The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1979), pp. 110-114. For the Uranian poets in England see Timothy d'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).

7. Leggett, Poetic Art, p. 81.