Aimez-vous Housman?

[Guest]

'Beacons and Blue Remembered Hills', broadcast on Radio 4 this morning and now on the iPlayer, may well be of interest to those who enjoy settings of Houseman's poetry.

[Serial_Apologist]

'Beacons and Blue Remembered Hills', broadcast on Radio 4 this morning and now on the iPlayer, may well be of interest to those who enjoy settings of Houseman's poetry.

Oh, there is no hope for me - I LOVE Houseman's poetry, and bought a book of his complete poems when in Church Stretton on holiday many years ago.

I can never make up my mind which of the settings I love more: Butterworth's or Ireland's, the latter in his "The Land of Lost Content" fro 1921 or 2. Vaughan Williams's are beautiful but sometimes overdramatise and kill the original spirit so subtley inflused through the words.

The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow
come in for the fair
There's men from the barge and the forge
and the mill and the fold,
The lads for the girls and the lads
for the liquor are there,
And there with the rest are the lads
that will never be old

There's chaps from the town and the field
and the till and the cart,
And many to count are the stalwart
and many the brave,
And many the handsome of face
and the handsome of heart,
And few that will carry their looks
or their truth to the grave.

I wish one could know them
I wish there were tokens to tell
The fortunate fellows that now
you can never discern;
And then one could talk with them friendly
and wish them farewell
And watch them depart on the way
that they will not return.

This I believe was written before the First World War, and if so has a prescience that is uncanny. One knows that George Butterworth perished in the horror of the trenches, and for that alone, hearing this setting always breaks me up.

S-A

[Norfolk Born]

First published in 1896.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks for finding that date, Ofchap.

[Mary Chambers]

Thank you for drawing my attention to this. I hadn't noticed it, and in any case I was out this morning when it was on, but I've just listened on iPlayer. I absolutely love Housman's poems. I love the economy and the pessimism and just the perfect beauty of so many of them. They are apparently simple, but express such profound feelings. Some of my favourites aren't from A Shropshire Lad - my top favourite is 'Tell me not here, it needs not saying' from Last Poems. They are so musical in themselves that I don't think they need music, but I do like the Vaughan Williams and John Ireland settings. Butterworth I find a bit tepid, but I don't know them well. I think Schubert would have composed wonderful settings if he had lived at the right time.

I'm glad Wendy Cope read her little gem 'I think I am in love with A.E. Housman', which I quoted (misquoted slightly, actually) on another thread.

I know Ludlow fairly well, but the programme made me want to go and look at Shropshire again, though I agree with whoever said that the poems are really about landscapes of the mind.

[LeMartinPecheur]

'Beacons and Blue Remembered Hills', broadcast on Radio 4 this morning and now on the iPlayer, may well be of interest to those who enjoy settings of Houseman's poetry.

1) "For e's a jolly good fellow."

2) The poet of A Shropshire Lad may have been good but he certainly wasn't jolly.

3) Ergo, he doesn't get an 'e' in his name

Signed, A slightly elderly Shropshire Lad

[Serial_Apologist]

Butterworth I find a bit tepid, but I don't know them well.

I much prefer his setting of "Is my Team Ploughing?" - the one in which the farm lad tells the ghost of his deceased friend what has been happening since he passed away, and, when he asks of the welfare of his girlfriend, callously tells him that he is now her lover. The words...

Yes lad! Yes lad!
I lie easy!
I lie as lads should choose.
I cheer a dead man's sweetheart!
Never ask me whose...

...are pursued by dramatic upward surges in the string quartet in the RVW setting; in Butterworth's the voice almost whispers that last line, the piano chords which follow dying away into silence.

[Flosshilde]

I first read Housman just a couple of weeks ago, when I was on holiday in Shropshire - beautiful country. It was A Shropshire Lad (of course) & as others have said very moving. Many do have pre-echoes (if I may be forgiven for using such an apalling expression) of WWI, but there were so many wars during the 2nd half of the 19th century that almost any might fit.

[aeolium]

my top favourite is 'Tell me not here, it needs not saying' from Last Poems.

Yes, a lovely poem. I particularly like the stanza:

"On acres of the seeded grasses
The changing burnish heaves;
Or marshalled under moons of harvest
Stand still all night the sheaves;
Or beeches strip in storms for winter
And stain the wind with leaves."

I agree with whoever said that the poems are really about landscapes of the mind.

Yes, unlike one of those in the programme who seemed to be saying that Housman's 'land of lost content' was physically traceable to a particular landscape, one described in the programme. Surely the point of that stanza ("That is the land of lost content/I see it shining plain/The happy highways where I went/And cannot come again.") is that the narrator cannot return there - it is a landscape of his own past.

He really is a master of the elegy. Another wonderful poem is the one that starts "Bring, in this timeless grave to throw,/No cypress, sombre on the snow;"

[Roslynmuse]

Butterworth really eats into the mind and the imagination, like Housman himself.

S_A - absolutely, re Is my team ploughing? RVW overdoes it, here and elsewhere. I listened to On Wenlock Edge last week and found it all a bit overcooked.

There are also good settings by Somervell and Graham Peel, and more recently John Ramsden Williamson has set much of the verse (I like his version of Sinner's Rue).

[Norfolk Born]

Apologies for mis-spelling Housman's name.

[Pabmusic]

Oh, there is no hope for me - I LOVE Houseman's poetry...
This I believe was written before the First World War, and if so has a prescience that is uncanny. One knows that George Butterworth perished in the horror of the trenches, and for that alone, hearing this setting always breaks me up.

S-A

Firstly, may I say how much I also love Housman's poetry. The missing final verse of "The lads in their hundreds" is of course:

"But now you may stare as you like and there's nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old."

What I'd like to say is that we usually judge the poem and settings (Butterworth's especially) with knowledge of two terrible World Wars. That isn't the poet's view at all - to the narrator, the "lads that will die in their glory" are "fortunate fellows" because they'll "never be old". They won't therefore lose "their looks, or their truth". Several of the poems have this theme - it's all rather decadent, post-Oscar Wilde expressionism, often with all-male overtones, and very popular with Edwardians.

Butterworth fitted perfectly into this world and responded with (I think at least) near-perfect settings. It could even be said that the composer shared something akin to the philosophy, for he never really settled to anything, being always restless, and perhaps found his karma in the trenches. He certainly went to war not expecting to return - he destroyed any manuscript he didn't have time to revise, never mentioned music to any of his military colleagues, never even told anyone he'd won the MC, but apparently threw himself wholeheartedly into soldiering. Maybe it's a frame of mind we can't comprehend easily now, but it certainly existed then.

Incidentally, did you know that the second performance of the Shropshire Lad songs (eight of them, anyway) was sung by Adrian Boult?

[Norfolk Born]

I wonder what Adrian Boult felt about VW's decision to 'drop' the goalkeeper from 'Is My Team Ploughing'?

[Ferretfancy]

It's interesting that sturdily heterosexual composers like Vaughan Williams and Warlock were amongst the many drawn to the deeply homo-erotic poetry of A Shropshire Lad.
There's something in that yearning sadness which catches the heart, especially within the shadow of the First World War.

In Forty Years On there's a nice Alan Bennet quip in which he talks of a soiree at Virginia Woolf's - " AE Housman was there, I remember, lured down by the promise of all in wrestling at Finsbury Park Baths"

[Serial_Apologist]

It's interesting that sturdily heterosexual composers like Vaughan Williams and Warlock were amongst the many drawn to the deeply homo-erotic poetry of A Shropshire Lad.
There's something in that yearning sadness which catches the heart, especially within the shadow of the First World War.

In Forty Years On there's a nice Alan Bennet quip in which he talks of a soiree at Virginia Woolf's - " AE Housman was there, I remember, lured down by the promise of all in wrestling at Finsbury Park Baths"

My guess is it is because that yearning sadness transcends sexuality - we've all felt them.