Housman's Cherry Trees: Toward the Practice of Marxist Explication

STORY 81 PATRICK STORY HOUSMAN'S CHERRY TREES: TOWARD THE PRACTICE OF MARXIST EXPLICATION LOVELIEST OF TREES Loveliest oftrees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, ofmy threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I willgo To see the cherry hung with snow. A.E. Housman (1859-1936) from A Shropshire Lad ( 1 896) The terms "Marxist" and "explication" have not often been brought together in recent American criticism. WhUe Marxism has steadUy won recognition as a superior theory of cultural development, formalist criticism stUl holds sway in the study of individual literary texts, especially poems. The method of dialectical and historical materialism needs to be demonstrated as the most effective approach to even the isolated lyric. The clearest way to provide such a demonstration is to apply the method to a text favored by formalists themselves. A.E. Housman's "Loveliest of Trees" has become a standard classroom piece in the United States, and in one of the best-selling formalist coUege texts, XJ. Kennedy's .4« Introduction to Poetry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), it is selected as the prototypical first poem for the student's consideration. Housman's poem is a logical choice for the formalist. It meets the general 82 MINNESOTA REVIEW English-speaking expectation of what a poem should look like: three quatrains of short (octosyllabic) lines, composed of simple diction and syntax, in couplet rhymes. It is also highly personalistic in content, devoid of any tendentious sociopolitical subject matter. In my classroom experience with paraphrasing it, most readers are first struck with the attitude of the speaker: ostensibly twenty, he already seems "old" in his gloomy awareness of his limited personal lifespan, how much already flown, how little left. But on consideration, his sense of mortality seems less incongruous. Age twenty falls within the period of the progress of personal development from, to use the terminology of the Romantic movement, "innocence to experience," which includes the acknowledgement of death as a reality. Moreover, the modern manifestation of the process, the "identity crisis" oflate adolescence , often includes at least a temporarily somber consciousness of life-expectancy . What seems extraordinary to many readers at this point is not the speaker's sense of mortality but its opposite: his confident expectation of attaining a fuU biblical measure of life, in which he can do exactly as he alone pleases—"look at things in bloom"! Christopher CaudweU's Illusion and Reality: A Study ofthe Sources of Poetry (1937, rpt. New York: International, 6th printing, 1970) provides the theoretical point of departure for an adequate interpretation of such a deceptively simple "nature lyric." CaudweU characterizes all poetry of the bourgeois class as expressing, in one form or another according to the historical circumstances, the "bourgeois Ulusion" that freedom is the product of individual instincts, which are perceived as being repressed and restrained by social relations: The working-out of the bourgeois iUusion concerning freedom first as a triumphant truth (the growth and increasing prosperity of capitalism), next as a gradually revealed lie (the decline and final crisis of capitalism ) and finaUy as its passage into its opposite, freedom as the life-won consciousness of social necessity (the proletarian revolution), is a colossal movement of men, materials, emotions and ideas, it is a whole history of toUing, learning, suffering and hoping men. Because of the scale, energy and material complexity of the movement, bourgeois poetry is the glittering, subtle, complex, many-sided thing it is. (p. 70) Housman's poetry, like much of the British poetry of the late nineteenth century, represents a synthesis of the two major cultural effects of the mature development of capitalism. First, the waning of the titantic, socially and historically conscious individualism of the British Romantic movement of 1789-1832. In that period, the bourgeois class, in order to liberate the newly created "self-expansive power in machinery and outside sources of raw material " (p. 89) moved once again, as in...