The Sunday Night Poem - A. E. Housman

Alfred Edward Housman, born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England, March 26, 1859, is almost the prototype of the sensitive poet. He was 'small and frail,' had six siblings and suffered the death of his mother when he was twelve. On his way to becoming a brilliant if not the preeminent classics scholar in England, he studied Latin and Greek at Oxford, where he fell in love with a handsome classmate, Moses Jackson. Jackson was heterosexual, though, and although they remained friends and even flatmates in London, Housman's affections were rebuffed.

Thus his everlasting misery, according to Professor Harold Bloom of Yale, "stems from unfulfilled homoeroticism," and is thought to be the afflatus for an astonishing collection of poems about grief, fleeting youth, "unrequited love, the oblivion of death, and idealized military life." Housman self-published his first volume of poetry, A Shropshire Lad, just as the Boer War (followed by the World War) aroused a haunting urgency for solace in the British people. His volumes began to sell, and Housman's legacy as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century was building.

Alfred Edward Housman, 1859-1936, is one of my all-time favorites. I believe every student should read him and then read him again as a young adult, and then over and over - all the way to senescence. His voice rings out like a distant bell heard on a gray morning, an interruption of quietude that makes us stand up and lean against the tilting sky, straining to hear the knells and fearful to understand them. His truths are as poignant as they are forlorn.

(Click below for two examples of his work.)

XL

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
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.

(from A Shropshire Lad, 1896)

XVI

How clear, how lovely bright,
How beautiful to sight
Those beams of morning play;
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

(from More Poems, 1936)