A pessimist who found solace in words

By Carl Heintze

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

These are two stanzas from a poem by the late A.E. Housman. Housman is the subject of a new play by Tom Stoppard, who has written, among other things,. Shakespeare in Love. His new play is called The Invention of Love, and it has just opened on Broadway after a successful run in London.

Reading about it reawakened my admiration for Housman, an Oxford don, actually a classic scholar, who spent most of his life teaching and who is most famous for three slim voluminous of poetry: "A Shropshire Lad," "More Poems," and "Last Poems."

Most of his poems are rhymed quatrains (four-line stanzas) and are purportedly devoted to be an anonymous young man (himself), who once lived in Shropshire, a part of northern England. That's also the scene of Ellis Peter's Brother Caedfel mysteries.

But the poems are more universal than Shropshire. Most are about death, or unrequited love--two subjects which seem to have been Housman's principal concern. Housman was in love only once, according to Stoppard's play, unfortunately with another man, and even more unfortunately, with a man who did not return his affection.

Unrequited love and death tend to bring a writer unrequited pessimism and Housman is, at least on the surface, a pessimist. And it was for that reason that I came to read him. I discovered his poetry about the beginning of World War II, when I was a young man filled with unrequited love and apprehensions of death.

As it turned out, I need not have worried. Love later was requited and I survived World War II, but I never have lost my enthusiasm for Housman's poetry. I think that's not so much for what it says, as the way it says it.

Housman's language, refined by his long study of Latin and Greek, makes English a joy to read.

Consider, for instance, one of his best known and beautiful poems:

Loveliest of trees the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along its bough
And stands about the woodland ride,
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now of my three score 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.

There are in these three stanzas both the wonder of being young when the world is filled with beauty and the knowledge that life is short and it is best to enjoy it while one can. That's a bald paraphrase of the poem, and it doesn't convey, in any way, the beauty with which Housman expresses it. But read the poem again. And again. Years after I first read it, it still brings back spring.

And I suppose that the coming of spring, as bittersweet a season as fall, has something to do with why I took out my book of his collected poems and went over them again the other day. They remind me of being young; they remind me of the sorrow of growing old and they do it with lovely language.

There's lots of this in Housman's poetry, the mixing of joy and sorrow, of the inevitable passage of time, of how wonderful youth is and how sad is old age:

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
Ands 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.

Who doesn't feel that way about being young, especially when one realizes youth doesn't last forever. We just wish it would.

So, Housman is like the best of poets universal, a man not just for the season of spring and youth, but also for old age and death.

Certainly that's what led me to him and what made me memorize some of his poems.

But the verses that struck most at the time were:

Life to be sure is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is and we were young.

It was a great line to remember when marching off to war.
And so was another I used to repeat to myself like a mantra:

Let us suffer an hour and see injustice done.

Well, I'm no longer young and I didn't lose my life, but Housman's poetry somehow sustained me through the time when I thought I might.

For that, I'll always be grateful to him despite his pessimism and his preoccupation with a lost youth and a coming death.

And for that reason I commend him to your attention.

Or at the least look for a cherry tree in blossom.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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