A New Poem on an Old Subject from a Notebook of A. E. Housman

A NEW POEM ON AN OLD SUBJECT FROM A NOTEBOOK OF A. E. HOUSMAN* TOM BURNS HABER I N the late summer of 1894, A. E. Housman's imagination, as the first of his four Notebooks shows, was trafficking with two weighty topics: the violent rivalries of young men and the worldly wisdom of his mythical Terence Hearsay, who was at this time being groomed as the spokesman of A Shropshire Lad. Pages 187 to 194 of Notebook A (so designated by Laurence Housman, who by the terms of his brother's will became his literary executor) belong to a period prior to the days of "continuous excitement" under which the greater part of A Shropshire Lad was written; but they antedate the crisis by only a few months, and by August of 1894 the first tremors of the earthquake were stirring. We may read what was happening to Terence in the analysis which Laurence made of his brother's Notebooks before they were broken up. These are the entries in A: 187-94: 187-189 An unfinished poem, fragments, and a few couplets from HTerence, this is stupid stuff." 190 Fragments. 191 "Farewell to barn and stack and tree." 192 "The star-filled seas are smooth tonight" and two lines from "Along the field as we came by." 193 "The vane on Hughley steeple." 194-197 Unfinished narrative (much corrected). Not all of the manuscript drafts for the poems named here can be identified, for the present condition of Notebook A (and the others) is much different from that in which A.E.H. left it: the order of the pages has been lost, and many of the original sheets now exist in fragments only. However several portions of the inventory can be identified in the manuscript as we now have it: the complete page 191 is intact, dated "Aug. 1894"; we have all of 192, showing the couplet which was to go into number 26 of A Shropshire Lad: And she shall lie with earth above And you beside another love. *The right to reprint any portion of this article is strict1y reserved. 254 UNIVBRSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, vol. XX, no. 3, April. 1951 A. E. HOUSMAN; A NEW POEM 255 Pages 193 and 194 are also complete, and fortunately, for the latter contains three stanzas and a little more of the poem which Laurence noted as an "unfinished narrative." Page 194 is somewhat difficult reading, for every line save one has been cancelled by an up-and-down pencil wave; and the whole page has been crossed with a huge comerto -corner X which the poet sometimes used to retire a first draft after a later one had been written. The analysis by LaUrence Housman shows that pages 194 to 197 were taken up with this poem, which allows the plausible guess that in the latter three pages, which have not survived, Housman would have had room to complete fair copy for his narrative. What has survived is worth the eyestrain. Immediately under the numeral 194 begins this stanza: Ned Lear and I were drunk last week, Oh dripping drunk were Ned and I, Too drunk to see, too drunk to speak, Too helpless drunk to reason why. You might have looked through Ludlow fair And never spied a tipsier pair. Indenting an inch, Housman continued: To Ludlow fair, the first of May All spic and span went I and Ned, Clean shirts, blue breastknots, neckties gay, New coats on back, new hats on head. And who this week are wearing those Two hats, the Lord Almighty knows. (Here we have the ebriose confession which Terence eventually spoke in A Shropshire Lad, LXII: Oh I have been to Ludlow fair And left my necktie God knows where.) After this prologue there was to be a quarrel and A.E.H. was in a hurry to get on into it. He was in a mood for action for, as we have seen, the graves of suicides, estrangements, fratricide, and the deaths of lovers had been freighting these portions of his Notebook . In Ned Lear he had prefigured no pacifist, and he was eager to let this rustic show...