'The Laurels All Are Cut'

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).]