On Learning to Enjoy Housman

If I let myself slip into a rainy, brown-and-gray reverie, I can summon to mind even now the illustration that accompanied Longfellow's "The Wreck of the Hesperus" in my tenth-grade English textbook. It was a reproduction of J. M. W. Turner's The Shipwreck, and to the eye of a teenager raised on kung fu movies, it was a little short on action. Sure, Turner included nervous tangles of white on the wave-tops to suggest the waters' dangers, and more than one lifeboat passenger perches inches from overboard, but there isn't even any lightning. As for the Longfellow poem, it immediately became my benchmark for boredom. What ought to have been a suspenseful, even macabre, narrative—I mean, there is a kid frozen to a ship's mast by the end—instead sounded ponderous and fusty. No syntactic prude out-prudes a tenth-grader facing the lines:

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,        And to-night no moon we see!"The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,        And a scornful laugh laughed he.

No moon we see? A scornful laugh laughed he? Boring, this is.

It would be hard to pinpoint when all that changed. During my sophomore year, I had a superb creative writing teacher, one who later ended up being my 11^th-grade English teacher and who was instrumental in bringing me around to poetry, but specific memories—and especially the chronology of them—remain jumbled. When did that Stetson professor come dazzle us with his reading of e. e. cummings during a guest lecture? When did I first read and reread Seamus Heaney's "Blackberry-Picking" and feel that I had understood it as a series of implications as much as a series of sentences? And when did I first feel viscerally struck by the force of self-recognition in a poem? When it happened, the poet who made me feel I had seen an aspect of myself in poetry was nearly as fusty as Longfellow: it was A. E. Housman, whom I am sure I must have read around the same time I read "The Wreck of the Hesperus"—perhaps "To an Athlete Dying Young" or "Terence, this is stupid stuff"? Those anthology pieces were not what hit a nerve, however; it was a Housman B-side that knocked me off my feet.

Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over;     I only vex you the more I try.All's wrong that ever I've done or said,And nought to help it in this dull head:     Shake hands, here's luck, good-bye.

But if you come to a road where danger     Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share,Be good to the lad who loves you trueAnd the soul that was born to die for you,     And whistle and I'll be there.

I grant that "I only vex you the more I try" still sometimes holds true, but I confess I am now embarrassed ever to have experienced this poem as a revelation. True, the loose iambic movement (there are too few anapests really to call it an anapestic meter) nicely reinforces the casual tone of the first stanza, which almost revels in the absolute frustration of seeming never to get things right ("All's wrong," the speaker says, and "nought to help it"—really, it has become an all-and-nothing situation); and true, the first and last lines of the first stanza balance the abruptness and gravity of the moment with an offhand casualness that betrays the speaker's deep grief; but the turn in the second stanza brings me waves of shame, almost a shipwreck's worth. I cannot dispute that in the phrase "the lad who loves you true," true as an adverb has a long pedigree—in the OED, there are ample attestations to this with citations from the illustrious Barnaby Googe and one H. Crompton ("Once I did love, and loved true"), who upon further examination is Hugh Crompton, a poet also so illustrious that a...