A Shropshire Lad

[Penelope]

DWill:

1. It seems to provide a time-stamp for the collection. I guess I had had the impression that the era was WW I, but appartently not so.

2. Housman puts a fair amount of information into this poem, which is not easy to do while managing the rhymes. He establishes the 50th birthday of Queen Victoria; he introduces in st. 3 the soldiers who have died in foreign lands in order to save the Queen. In st. 7, he brings in the living members of regiment belting out "God Save the Queen." Three generations are joined in st. 8 in the noble attempt to save the Queen.

I thought the 50 years was referring to Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee - 50 years on the throne....1887. There were a lot of items produced to commemorate her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Bibles are especially collected. 1896 is etched on my brain!!!! That was when they were published.

In the Victorian periodicals/magazines/newspapers which I am wont to read from time to time...I notice that there did seem to be a genuine affection for Queen Victoria...well she had been on the throne since she was 19 years old (I think!). The Government would have used her image to stir up the soldiers to fight (the rotten lot!.) You know how Shakespear's Henry V - used the 'St Crispins Day' speech to urge the men on to fight.....using their emotional response.

3. Question: Is this a full-on patriotic tribute or are we to see irony? Do the soldiers indeed assist God in saving the Queen? It might be something that I, 21st century American, will have trouble answering. I was always puzzled by God Save the Queen. It might take Penelope to straighten this out for me!

I don't think Housman is being ironic. We do have very fervent feelings - whipped up by imagery..... In this Country now, most people are not Royalists, but we do have a great affection for our Queen (well, most people). Still, the Falklands war springs to mind....the soldiers would not have gone there and fought - for the Queen or Mrs. Thatcher.....especially when we remember that Housman's troops would have been involved in man to man, face to face combat.....not just blowing up a 'faceless' ship.

No, our press used - 'National Pride' to stir up the support for that war.

God Save the Queen - is such a morbid tune...I wish we had something more jolly!! Land of Hope and Glory is a wonderful tune and song....the fact that most people now sing 'Land of Dope and Tories'....and instead of Shakespear's 'This Sceptred Isle' they say 'This Sceptic Isle' just proves that we have become more synical. There were a lot of poets who wrote after WWI that we had lost our 'innocence' as a Nation, after the Great War they all felt we had lost something. Yeats wrote - 'The Wheel has lost its centre'. I don't think Housman was part of that

I am trying not to comment on my personal feelings. I am trying to be objective....

[DWill]

Penelope,
Thanks for pointing out my error. It was indeed 50 years of rule.

I am so used to expecting irony when it comes to young men laying down their lives in war--especially for the Queen, especially in a war of which no one may know the point. I think of that Wilfred Owen poem from WW I, "Dulce Et Decorum Est," which puts an entirely different spin on dying for one's country. But thanks for your view, which is that the devotion shown to the Queen/Mother Country is real.

Please don't feel you need to be objective!

DWill

[DWill]

Since we are fortunate to have more women than men participating right now, I wondered if you have any reaction to the several "Gather ye rosebud"-type poems in the book.These are as old as the hills, of course.
They are seduction poems in which the guy usually convinces the girl to take pity on him and give in to sex. No. 5 is an exception, where the girl gives him the heave-ho, but the idea is the same. I realize I'm taking the discussion back to sex, but I suppose everything winds up there, anyway. Do you get bugged by these poems? I was going to ask why there don't seem to be any modern poems where the woman does the persuading, but with what is known about my gender's admirable readiness for action, I guess I don't have to.

No. 6 strikes a related theme.

DWill

[Saffron]

... "Gather ye rosebud"-type poems in the book.These are as old as the hills, of course.
They are seduction poems in which the guy usually convinces the girl to take pity on him and give in to sex. No. 5 is an exception, where the girl gives him the heave-ho, but the idea is the same.
DWill

I find it funny that in #5 the the girl's reply is, "Good-bye, young man, good-bye." It is somewhat unexpected. I know this is a generalization, but I do think that for women conversation is essential. I have a friend that used to make her husband talk to her for an hour (she says she timed him) before she would have sex with him.

I realize I'm taking the discussion back to sex, but I suppose everything winds up there, anyway.

Does it?

[Penelope]

Oh Dear.....I think I must be a bit like the 'Wife of Bath'.....rather than the sweet damsel. And, furthermore, I think I probably had a lot of the 'Wife of Bath' in me when I was young and still desirable.

Nobody tried to sweet-talk me into having sex, and just as well because I know I wouldn't have taken much persuading. Also, I was never sexually harrassed at work......humph!!!!

Suffice it to say, it is fortuitous that I met Norman when I was 14 and married him when I was 18.

So, whilst I enjoy the language and music of this poem - the sentiments of the young lady are beyond me. Except that in those days, the consequences of pre-marital sex could be terrifying. Still, the tone of the poem doesn't sound like she was terrified of consequences....it sounds like she was just leading him on and teasing. What do you think?

[DWill]

Still, the tone of the poem doesn't sound like she was terrified of consequences....it sounds like she was just leading him on and teasing. What do you think?

Yes, I think that's a good way to look at the poem that hadn't occurred to me, as an unexpected variation on the "Rosebuds" theme and an expression by the girl of her power to make the boy wait until she's darn-well ready! (or just wait, period).

DW

[Saffron]

If you notice all the poems about love are melancholy. If the young woman in #5 goes along, it would break with the tone that runs through the work. The world at the time the poems were writen was changing rapidly. It was becoming complex and harsh. Maybe the rejection and the over all melancholy is comentary on the times.

[DWill]

The tone is melancholy, that's for sure. I don't know why this is. The poet/speaker says in the final poem of the volume that it's just a good way to look at life--fortifies you, makes you less vulnerable to the various misfortunes that afflict us here. It is almost a medieval take on the vanity of expecting earthly happiness. The difference is that there is not even a better expectation after the grave. Though churches and graveyards form the settings for Housman's somber reflections, he never offers us any traditional Christian consolation or justification. I don't suppose he was a believer in that sense.

Still, it's a very tender melancholy he creates here. I'm partial to the meditative, elegaic voice of the poems. A well known example, often anthologized, is XIX, "To an Athlete Dying Young."

So I think for me the jury is out on the matter of the melancholy having a source in the era of the poems. The times about which he writes were fairly distant. He appears to cast a mood over them, not capture a mood that existed. This is done all the time with romantic treatments of the past. Housman's treatment, I feel, has some romantic quality to it, but it's harder to see since death permeates the poems. Can death be romantic?

DWill

[Penelope]

I just thought I would post an 'item of input' which has affected me for many years.

The first was the 'true' story of a servant girl in an aristocratic household here in England......she was pursued by a youth...(as in the poem)...and became pregnant. She made a beautiful and intricate lace bonnet for her baby.....and when the baby was born...she placed the bonnet on the baby and then she drowned it. Because she did not know what else to do.

There is written record of this tragedy.....the world HAS improved since those days. But this young woman spoke volumes...just by her actions.

The only people who could read and write in the 17th, 18th and most of the 19th century, were the priviliged and educated. Perhaps they had 'time' to reflect on the unfairness or the absurdity of life.

If one can find the writings, thoughts, records of the ordinary people, whose words, unfortunately, were often recorded at the Gallows....or such, one often finds that the human lifespan wasn't seen as the ultimate end, but that there was a 'sense of movement' or a sense of growth of the spirit...rather than a sense of 'this is it'... all there is.

I collect and treasure...early newspapers, broadsheets and magazines....because they record the 'ordinary' events and people. I have read some early 19th century Methodist Church magazines with lots of sentimental poems about the deaths of infants and babies. I thought, 'These people were obsessed with death......of children'.....but then I read....that in Manchester, England....in the 1840's....80% of babies born, died in infancy. They were not obsessed with death.....They were attempting to come to terms with it....through poetry.

An important thing.....Poetry. And sometimes....it is more potent...if one is not distracted by the need to get the punctuation and grammar correct.

[DWill]

Penelope,
Yes, when you peruse the gravestones in an old cemetery (old being 1700s in this country), you are struck by the numbers of children and babies. We can't imagine today how life could be so tenuous, death is so exceptional (relatively) in the prosperous countries..I recall a haunting couplet on one grave in Storrs, Conn: "Your son like mine may set at noon/Your soul be cauld for very soon."
Your hobby of collecting sounds fascinating.

DWill