Shropshire Lad

[Pabmusic]

I don't think one requires 'proof' that either Housman's poems or Butterworth's song cycle were directly influenced by the Great War!

But The Lads in Their Hundreds was the poem mentioned, and the British Army - including The King's Shropshire Light Infantry - was involved in a number of conflicts between the time Housman was born in 1859 and the date he published the work in 1896.There are so many poems about young soldiers dying that I find it equally hard to imagine that the poem simply refers to lads who happen to die young.

You're right of course, and I certainly wasn't trying to suggest that the poem is 'simply' referring to anything. What I was trying to get across is the idea that we now hear the song as a premonition of the Great War and Butterworth's setting in that context becomes profoundly moving to us. But the setting is actually from 1910-11 and the poem from before 1896. It's a poem that's primarily about dying young and thus preserving one's looks and truth (a common theme in Housman).

The poet looks around him at Ludlow fair and sees hundreds of lads from all over, but among them "few that will carry their looks or their truth [presumably their youthful idealism or something like it] to the grave". That must mean that they'll get old and these things will fade away. These are the ones who won't die young. The "fortunate fellows" are those that will "die in their glory and never be old". The army reference has to be seen in a different light too. In 1896, Britain had a small, professional army. The mass recruitment drives didn't begin before the Second Boer War a couple of years later, and conscription wasn't introduced until 1916. So to an extent joining the army and serving in foreign parts was genuinely attractive to Victorian country lads, and a real option. Housman wrote several poems about just this (nos. 3, 4, 22 & 34 in A Shropshire Lad, for instance, as well as On the idle hill of summer, which GSKB set) but I can detect no concern at their plight - quite the opposite, in fact.

But this is - of course - my take on it. We simply can't imagine how differently the poem might have been viewed had WW1 not happened.

You smile upon your friend to-day,
To-day his ills are over;
You hearken to the lover's say,
And happy is the lover.

'Tis late to hearken, late to smile,
But better late than never:
I shall have lived a little while
Before I die forever.

Interestingly, only nine songs were sung at the first performance on May 16th 1911 in Oxford (On the idle hill of summer probably hadn't been written yet). But The lads in their hundreds had definitely been written, yet it wasn't sung (by Campbell McInnes accompanied by the composer). Nor was it included in the selection sung by Adrian Boult (accompanied by Hugh Allen) a few days later.

[Pabmusic]

Not so innocent judging by the wikipedia entry which suggested he liked reading French books that were deemed pornography in England . If Butterworth was severely heterosexual - a brilliant phrase but I am not sure what is meant by it - did the very obvious subtext of the poems escape him ? Is it harsh to see Housman's veneration for early death of these young men as being about his attitude to lost male beauty as much as the general perils of growing old ?

I meant that is was RVW (judging from the recent-ish documentary) who seemed severely hetero. Butterworth's is a rather more interesting case since there's nothing that I know of to give us a clue - no women at all in his life (except his mother who died in 1910) at any stage. I have read speculation that he was gay, but I can't see any clear evidence. He was very much an Edwardian upper class only child who spent his entire life in the company of males. Having said that, there's film of him dancing with the Karpeles sisters and Cecil Sharp!

[aeolium]

I think it's hard to argue that death as a welcome arrival, keeping golden youth from age and decay, is a constant theme in Housman's poetry. Surely there are also plenty of poems which celebrate the beauty of life, bemoan its transience and emphasise the horror of death. For instance, the poem "Loveliest of trees the cherry now..." in which the poet regrets that he has only fifty more springs (if living to an average threescore years and ten) to see the cherry in bloom. In "To an Athlete Dying Young" there is the verse "Eyes the shady night has shut/Cannot see the record cut,/And silence sounds no worse than cheers/After earth has stopped the ears". "Bredon Hill" celebrates the joys of summer with the chime of church bells yet contrasts this with the tolling of the bell for the narrator's dead lover. The lovely Last Poem "Tell me not here, it needs not saying..." concludes with the verse "For nature, heartless, witless nature,/Will neither care nor know/What stranger's feet may find the meadow/And trespass there and go,/Nor ask amid the dews of morning/If they are mine or no." That poem seems to me more a statement of regret at the transience of man's existence than welcoming death as an end to suffering. And then this:

Like mine, the veins of those that slumber
Leapt once with dancing fires divine;
The blood of all this noteless number
Ran red like mine.

How still, with every pulse in station,
Frost in the founts that used to leap,
The put to death, the perished nation,
How sound they sleep!

These too, these veins which life convulses,
Wait but a while, shall cease to bound;
I with the ice in all my pulses
Shall sleep as sound.

[french frank]

What I was trying to get across is the idea that we now hear the song as a premonition of the Great War and Butterworth's setting in that context becomes profoundly moving to us.

Yes, the WWI premonition idea is a nice one, rather like an inadvertent example of 'dramatic irony' - we, with hindsight, take a meaning that was not intended by the speaker, but is quite satisfying for being 'true'.

So to an extent joining the army and serving in foreign parts was genuinely attractive to Victorian country lads, and a real option. Housman wrote several poems about just this (nos. 3, 4, 22 & 34 in A Shropshire Lad, for instance, as well as On the idle hill of summer, which GSKB set) but I can detect no concern at their plight - quite the opposite, in fact.

Yes, so the the themes are intertwined - war is just one cause of young men's deaths, along with illnesses, accidents &c. I do agree that (as aeolium also says) these are Housman's reflections on mortality, and make what you will of his insistence on the 'happier' side of early death! Youth is the best of life (in beauty and doing), but I wonder if there is any evidence that Housman himself would have preferred to have died young or whether he just wishes the happy fate on others. He seems to have a high degree of detachment about the feelings of other, doesn't he?

In fact, thinking of 'Loveliest of trees', it does seem to argue that 'life' has quite a lot going for it - too much to enjoy in even the normal life span of 'three score years and ten'.

[Mary Chambers]

"Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young."

From "More Poems", published 1936..

Master of the succinct.

[Barbirollians]

"Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young."

From "More Poems", published 1936..

Master of the succinct.

Maybe but a poem that just raises my hackles .

[Mary Chambers]

Maybe but a poem that just raises my hackles .

Why? The first two lines irritate me (I don't consider it shameful to choose not to fight), but the second two move me very much.

[french frank]

Why? The first two lines irritate me (I don't consider it shameful to choose not to fight)

Laurence Housman belonged to the Peace Pledge Union!

[Mary Chambers]

His brother? Am I misinterpreting Alfred Edward? I'm confused now! Too late at night for me to pursue at the moment.

[french frank]

His brother? Am I misinterpreting Alfred Edward? I'm confused now! Too late at night for me to pursue at the moment.

Yes, his brother (younger?) - but I read the lines, I think, as you did.

[gurnemanz]

"to an extent joining the army and serving in foreign parts was genuinely attractive to Victorian country lads, and a real option." Not quite the same thing but I can't help thinking of Rupert Brooke and his ilk relishing a bracing challenge amid the Edwardian malaise.

"Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!"

[Pabmusic]

A friend has just sent me this, which returns a scholarly and erudite discussion to reality with a bump:

[aeolium]

A very appropriate image for a poet who, by his own report, wooed his Muse by drinking a pint of beer and then going for a walk, upon which "there would flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of."

[Pabmusic]

A very appropriate image for a poet who, by his own report, wooed his Muse by drinking a pint of beer and then going for a walk, upon which "there would flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of."

[11.30: just back from The Merry Undergraduate - or it may have been The Dear Boy]

Into my brain an air of fools
Through my dull headache blows:
What are those dim-remembered stools,
What rounds, what loos are those?

That is the pub of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy lounge-bar where I went
And cannot come again until tomorrow lunch-time.

[To do: revise scansion of last line]

[amateur51]

[11.30: just back from The Merry Undergraduate - or it may have been The Dear Boy]

Into my brain an air of fools
Through my dull headache blows:
What are those dim-remembered stools,
What rounds, what loos are those?

That is the pub of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy lounge-bar where I went
And cannot come again until tomorrow lunch-time.

[To do: revise scansion of last line]

Lovely stuff, Pabs