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