GOOD/BAD POETRY: THE POETRY OF A E HOUSMAN
I cannot remember who it was that reflected upon the pleasure provided by good/bad films, those B movie creations which, despite the sometimes wooden acting or cliché ridden scripts can often grip and even move one. Casablanca for example, for all it’s celebrity contains a plot that is barely credible and moments that demand more than is reasonable in efforts of willing suspension of disbelief .Yet it undoubtedly contains within it a fable of considerable power that speaks to something very deep in the human psyche.
A similar pleasure can be had from good/bad poetry, A.E. Housman’s Epitaph on an army of mercenaries for example.
'These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.'
The poems sentiments seem somewhat dated now, however it contains within it something timeless, universal, possibly even noble. As Alan Bennett has observed, the poem has something of the morality of the Seven Samurai or the Gunfight at the OK Coral about it.
I grew up in Shropshire, ostensibly Housman country, though he knew Worcestershire better. I 'discovered' his poetry in early adolescence and there is of course an overwhelming aura of youth and dying young that inhabits his poetry, which can have an appeal to a morbid adolescent mindset.
It is also an aura that can easily be parodied.
'“What still alive at twenty-two,
A fine upstanding lad like you?If your throats to broad to slit,
Slit your girl’s and swing for it!
To be sure you’ll not be glad
When they come to hang you lad,
Still bacon’s not the only thing,
Cured by hanging from a string.”*
But there is something in the quality of the verse that, like Casablanca or the words of a sentimental love song can move one.
“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows
What are those blue remembered hills.
What spires what farms are those?
It is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways were I went,
And cannot come again.”
*Hilare Belloc
A similar pleasure can be had from good/bad poetry, A.E. Housman’s Epitaph on an army of mercenaries for example.
'These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.'
The poems sentiments seem somewhat dated now, however it contains within it something timeless, universal, possibly even noble. As Alan Bennett has observed, the poem has something of the morality of the Seven Samurai or the Gunfight at the OK Coral about it.
I grew up in Shropshire, ostensibly Housman country, though he knew Worcestershire better. I 'discovered' his poetry in early adolescence and there is of course an overwhelming aura of youth and dying young that inhabits his poetry, which can have an appeal to a morbid adolescent mindset.
| They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail: | |
| The whistles blow forlorn, | |
| And trains all night groan on the rail | |
| To men that die at morn. |
It is also an aura that can easily be parodied.
'“What still alive at twenty-two,
A fine upstanding lad like you?If your throats to broad to slit,
Slit your girl’s and swing for it!
To be sure you’ll not be glad
When they come to hang you lad,
Still bacon’s not the only thing,
Cured by hanging from a string.”*
But there is something in the quality of the verse that, like Casablanca or the words of a sentimental love song can move one.
“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows
What are those blue remembered hills.
What spires what farms are those?
It is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways were I went,
And cannot come again.”
*Hilare Belloc
