is the first line of my favorite poem of all time. It's by A.E. Housman, and I think he put it at the end of his collection (linked to the title above), A Shropshire Lad, because he saw it as I do - as a kind of dessert after eating the meat and vegetables of the rest of the book. Unfortunately, it's Baked Alaska following plain (but healthful) fare.
It's difficult to say anything about Housman's poetry in general, or A Shropshire Lad in particular, that he doesn't say himself in "Terence." Although, one thing he doesn't say, in any of his writings, is that the darkness of them may have been the result of the fact that he was a gay man in Victorian and Edwardian England. And abstinance didn't make him as happy as he could have been.
"Terence" is Housman's justification of the dark subjects he usually wrote about. And even knowing that - how uninspiring it sounds - I love it because it's such a personal story, with a clear moral (though without sacrificing the story, or forcing the rhyme-scheme) and a wonderful ancient history lesson to boot.
The thing's kind of a mini-epic - and it's funny, informative and sobering.
2 comments:
To hear Housman, and A Shropshire Lad described as "healthful fare" brings me up a little short.
It is fortyfive years and more since I have read the collection. As soon as I read the first, the emotions of the first reading came flooding back.
I think it a sad, almost tragic, commentary on the life of men in the late 1800's. That Housman was obsessed with the ways by which the life of men is one side of it; that so many of the lives he depicted were short and wasted the other.
There is also a very sad and pessimistic reflection that he (Housman) at the age of thirty plus had outlived most of those about whom he wrote.
My impression of Housman is that he was a constitutionally cheerful guy, who did see a lot of tragedy in his life - and I think it comes through...let me see if I can remember the proper term...nope, so I'll just say the rhyme and meter of the poems.
The subjects are dark, but the underlying structure is bright. And I think he was trying to make that point exactly.
I think I share his "sense of life" (as Ayn Rand called it), and I could write twenty such poems myself [though badly, no doubt]. I couldn't come close to "Terence"
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