A. E. Housman's Latin Elegy to Moses Jackson

THE READING AT THE 2002 ANNUAL MEETING of the APA in Philadelphia of Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love, ¹ a drama which places much emphasis on Housman's unrequited love for Moses Jackson, his undergraduate contemporary at St John's College, Oxford and housemate in London lodgings in the late 1870s and early 1880s, motivated me to look again at the Latin elegy addressed to Jackson with which Housman prefaced his edition of the first book of Manilius' Astronomica, published in 1903. ² After an inscription sodali meo M. I. Jackson, harum litterarum contemptori, "to my comrade Moses Jackson, scorner of these studies," in an ironic version of the usual dedication of a learned work to a fellow scholar, ³ fourteen elegiac couplets follow. The choice of elegiacs for Housman's dedicatory poem is of course natural given the dedicatory function of epigrams in antiquity, ⁴ but its address to a friend from whom the poet is separated at the other end of the world also recalls the basic situation of Ovid's elegiac exile poetry. By 1903 Housman was Professor of Latin at University College London, while Jackson was far away as a headmaster in India, where he had been (apart from occasional visits to England) since 1887, ⁵ and Housman's elegy shows throughout an ethos of lamentation for opportunity lost through physical apartness which matches that of Ovid in exile. The poem begins with an evocation of starlit evenings long ago (1-4):

Signa pruinosae variantia luce cavernas
     noctis et extincto lumina nata die
solo rure vagi lateque tacentibus arvis
    surgere nos una vidimus oceano.

The constellations that besprinkle the caverns of frosty night, and the lights that are born at the extinction of the day, together we saw them rise from Ocean as we wandered in the deserted countryside and the fields silent far and wide.

The warm memory of common friendly activity with which the poem begins, recalling evening walks together long ago, echoes in general terms a poem from Ovid's exilic verse, the nostalgic account of his youthful travels and talk with the poet Aemilius Macer in ex Ponto 2.10; for Ovid and Macer as for Housman and Jackson, imitating Callimachus' famous lament for his fellow-poet Heraclitus (Ep. 2 Pfeiffer), ⁶ the sun often set on their peripatetic conversations (Pont. 2.10.37 saepe dies sermone minor fuit), and the frosty evenings of Housman's starlit walks with Jackson also recall and invert Ovid's imagined communing with his distant friend under the frosty sky of Tomis (2.10.48 gelido . . . sub axe). ⁷ But the picture of a pair walking alone in the starlight has a romantic overtone which Ovid's poem patently lacks, and which sets the tone for the subdued but clear romanticism of Housman's approach to Jackson in this poem.

The opening of the poem's dedicatory section, following some lines describing the literary achievement and poor textual transmission of Manilius (5-14), gives the reasons for the selection of Jackson as dedicatee (15-20):

non ego mortalem vexantia sidera sortem
    aeternosve tuli sollicitare deos,
sed cito casurae tactus virtutis amore
    humana volui quaerere nomen ope,
virque virum legi fortem brevemque sodalem
      qui titulus libro vellet inesse meo.

I did not endure, not I, to importune the stars that blast our mortal lot, or the eternal gods, but smitten with love for valour that would swiftly fall I resolved to seek a name with human help, and man to man I chose a brave and brief companion who should be willing to stand at the head of my book.

Here the strength of Housman's feelings for Jackson, memorably encapsulated in his English love-poetry, ⁸ is transmuted into heroic comradeship, but for alert readers of the Latin this aspect co-exists with...