A. E. Housman
Half-Way Through the Plains
A Study of More Poems XXXV, by Darrell Sutton
Half-way, for one commandment broken,
The woman made her endless halt,
And she to-day, a glistering token,
Stands in the wilderness of salt.
Behind, the vats of judgment brewing
Thundered, and thick the brimstone snowed;
He to the hill of his undoing
Pursued his road.
Over the last seven decades several learned commentators have remarked upon the religious poems created by Housman, particularly those based on Biblical texts. An assemblage of those poems, and comments about them made by able literary critics, would comprise three thousand pages or more. Housman was a professed unbeliever in any deity. Many scholars have considered the reasons for an atheist’s fascination with holy scripture. Among them was Carol Efrati who published ‘Housman’s Use of Biblical Narrative‘, in A. Holden, J. Birch, A.E. Housman: A Reassessment (1999). There is much to admire in the essay, and her brief exposition of More Poems XXXV is relevant to ongoing discussions of the poem. But her handling of the text is eisegetic, and she does not go into the details of the structure of his verse.
Another examination is in order, I believe. Housman’s poem presents a picture of Lot, his wife, and the remembrance of them. The tale to which the poem alludes seems a strange basis upon which to originate a poem. Housman, however, thought otherwise, drawing together a compilation of ideas. The Gospel of Luke, 17:32, contains three short words, ‘Remember Lot’s Wife’. To this command of Christ, Housman was obedient – but not in the way originally intended by the first century AD Jewish rabbi. Wide-ranging thoughts led Housman to meditate on [literary] matters in the past, present, and future. The poems he composed encompass all three timespans. In poetry, he read widely. His interests took him into ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the texts of Greece and Rome, through medieval intervals, onward to the Romantic Poets and Victorian writers and their habitations. Several of Housman’s poems throw open wide the windows of history. Through carefully crafted lines of verse the characters drawn by him are fixed in readers’ memories. Many of his sentences are unforgettable. Who does not love the ‘blue remembered hills’ in ‘the land of lost content’? Besides, the recollected fields of yore were fertile grounds in which to plant the seeds of his fecund ideas. Some seedlings appeared in A Shropshire Lad and in Last Poems, then again in More Poems. Continue reading
ENDNOTES, August 2020
Klimt, Hygeia
ENDNOTES, August 2020
In this edition: Brahms celebrated in Vienna – patriotic music denigrated in Britain, by Stuart Millson
The city of Vienna is home to two of the world’s greatest orchestras: the Vienna Philharmonic, once conducted by Karajan, and famous to a wide international audience via the annual New Year’s Day broadcast of Strauss waltzes and polkas; and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra – the ensemble that gave such world premieres as Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. In proud homage to the music of Johannes Brahms (1833-97), the Wiener Symphoniker has set down on CD for the Sony label a new cycle of the great German composer’s four symphonies. Recorded live in 2019 at Vienna’s Musikverein – in the Golden Hall, no less – the orchestra, under the masterful baton of the distinguished Swiss conductor, Philippe Jordan, has produced what must rank as one of the best Brahms symphony sequences of recent years.
The recording has achieved that fine balance between a rich, overall sound – that late-romantic glow from a large orchestra – but with a spotlight on the delicate playing of the section principals, such as the yearning woodwind in the Andante and Allegretto movements in the titanic, yet tender, First Symphony, op. 68. Jordan directs the progress of the symphonic argument with restraint, allowing the music to find its own breath and pace – saving a great surge of noble energy for the final furlong of the great work, yet even then avoiding the temptation to wallow in too much expansive grandeur. This is a “Brahms 1” with clarity, definition, but never too heavy and overburdened with storm and stress. Continue reading →
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