'Ten Thousand Times I’ve Done My Best'

Nineteen-twenty-two, just a century ago, is judged an annus miribilis by literary folk, the high-water mark of Modernism. The roll-call of summits is known to all: Ulysses, Sodome et Gomorrhe, Petersburg, The Girl on the Boat, The Waste Land, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. And at a lower elevation: The Beautiful and Damned and Jacob’s Room. 

Most of these books deserve our admiration but for this reader the unchallenged Book of the Year for 1922 was the modestly titled Last Poems. Have you read it? Auden says of its author: “Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust, / Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer.” And Philip Larkin, no mean judge of misery, writes of him: “For Housman is the poet of unhappiness; no one else has reiterated his single message so plangently.”

 

A.E. Housman writes for grownups who remember what it felt like to be on the cusp of being grownups. As a poet, while never adolescent himself, he retained a vivid understanding of adolescence and its taste for melodrama – a subtle distinction, I know, but crucial for appreciating his delicately calibrated verse. See XI from Last Poems:

 

“Yonder see the morning blink:

         The sun is up, and up must I,

     To wash and dress and eat and drink

     And look at things and talk and think

         And work, and God knows why.

 

“Oh often have I washed and dressed

         And what’s to show for all my pain?

     Let me lie abed and rest:

     Ten thousand times I’ve done my best

         And all’s to do again.”

 

This might be a teenager contemplating the dreary mundanity of life as an adult. Or it might be a gifted classicist considering his unfulfilled life, one of Henry James’ “poor, sensitive gentlemen.” Housman died on this date, April 30, in 1936, at age seventy-seven.