A thoughtful reader, knowing of my fondness for A.E. Housman’s poems, has sent me the English composer John Ireland’s 1928 setting for a verse from Last Poems (1922, that literary annus mirabilis). The baritone is Mark Stone; the pianist, Sholto Kynoch. Here is Housman’s poem, which serves as the foreword to his second volume of verse:
“We’ll to
the woods no more,
The laurels
all are cut,
The bowers
are bare of bay
That once
the Muses wore;
The year
draws in the day
And soon
will evening shut:
The laurels
all are cut,
We’ll to the
woods no more.
Oh, we’ll no
more, no more
To the leafy
woods away,
To the high
wild woods of laurel,
And the
bowers of bay no more.”
Common
language, nothing exotic. Housman, of course, would know that in Ovid’s
account, Daphne was pursued by Apollo and turned into a laurel tree. The Romans
awarded laurel leaves to victors. Larkin calls Housman the “poet of unhappiness”
and there’s something to it, though in this poem the mood is closer to melancholy.
Published four years after the Armistice, it may reflect an era bereft of heroism,
honor, patriotism, echoing the title of the second novel, No More Parades (1924), in Ford Madox Ford’s great tetralogy, Parade’s End.
Housman’s poems
endure thanks to their clarity and directness. They appeal to emotions almost universally understood. In The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988),
Kingsley Amis writes:
“Of course I
think it ungrateful and wrong that Housman should never have been
conventionally admitted as a great English poet, one of the greatest since
Arnold, but not so surprising when you consider some of the people who have
been so admitted. What are the objections to him? His themes are restricted: I
started to make a list of them until it occurred to me that the same objection
would exclude from the canon Milton, Herbert, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats. . . . He
turns his back on the modern world: next question. He made no technical
innovations: get out of my sight.”
[The Larkin tag is drawn from “All Right When You Knew Him,” a review of Richard
Perceval Graves’ A.E. Housman: The
Scholar-Poet (1979), collected in Required
Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (1983).]
2 comments:
Charles Williams believed Housman was paraphrasing the first lines of a poem by Théodore de Banville, published in Les Stalactites (1846): "Nous n’irons plus au bois, les lauriers sont coupés". In a letter to Williams (March 8, 1930), Housman writes: "The prelude to Last Poems has nothing to do with Banville but is from an old French nursery rhyme:
Nous n’irons plus au bois,
Les lauriers sont coupés;
La belle que voilà
Ira les ramasser."
Hearing the first two lines as a young girl, George Sand writes in Histoire de ma vie: "Je me retirai de la danse pour y penser, et je tombai dans une profonde mélancolie. Je ne voulus faire part à personne de ma préoccupation, mais j’aurais volontiers pleuré, tant je me sentais triste et privée de ce charmant bois de lauriers où je n'étais entrée en rêve que pour en être aussitôt dépossédée."
I reread Lord Jim a while back, and in the introduction (I never skip them, fool that I am) all the fellow could talk about was Conrad's technical innovations, all things which I didn't even notice when I read the novel. All I could see was Conrad's fearless wrestling with his theme - the moral status of human actions.
I'm just a reader, but I think I know why Conrad wrote the book.
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