Alfred Edward Housman (A E Housman) was a lifelong classical scholar at University College London and Cambridge University, right up until his death in 1936. He was also a gifted poet whose primary work, A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems, was published in 1896 and became a lasting success. The collection struck a chord with many English composers, among them Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Ivor Gurney, all of whom set his poems to music.

The collection’s various melancholy themes, including dying young and being separated from an idealised pastoral childhood, ensured that it accompanied many a young man to the trenches in the Great War. Housman had always had a young male readership in mind and as W H Auden said: “no other poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent“. Equally, George Orwell remembered that, among his generation at Eton College in the wake of World War I: “these were the poems which I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy”.

There’s a phrase Housman used that I have always found striking: “blue remembered hills”, three simple words that exemplify the melancholic tone of poem number XL, Into my heart an air that kills. It consists of just two quatrains that reflect on the passage of time and the futility of longing for a long-gone land and age. The speaker, in a distant land, recalls the hills and spires of his homeland. He recognises that, whilst he was happy when he lived there, he cannot return there now he is older and has left that land behind.

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.

Surprisingly, Housman wasn’t actually from Shropshire, he was from Worcestershire, and hadn’t even visited Shropshire until after he had started writing the poem cycle. It is not Housman who is the Shropshire lad, but a literary construct. Be that as it may, here’s another punchy short poem from the cycle, again referencing the passage of time but this time evoking a carpe diem urgency about the here and now. Funnily enough, as I write this in view of my garden, my own cherry tree is hung with snow, its ‘winter blossom’ as implied by this poem.

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

Now, of my threescore 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