XXXIX (from Last Poems)
By AE Housman
When summer’s end is nighing
And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
And all the feats I vowed
When I was young and proud.
The weathercock at sunset
Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
That looked to Wales away
And saw the last of day.
From hill and cloud and heaven
The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
And hushed the countryside,
But I had youth and pride.
And I with earth and nightfall
In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
And darkness hard at hand,
And the eye lost the land.
The year might age, and cloudy
The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
Breathed from beyond the snows,
And I had hope of those.
They came and were and are not
And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
That ever can ensue
Must now be worse and few.
So here’s an end of roaming
On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
For summer’s parting sighs,
And then the heart replies.
I chose this week’s poem because this is the last week of my summer before school starts back. The poem beginning “When summer’s end is nighing” is numbered but untitled, like all the others in the 1922 collection, Last Poems, Housman compiled and published this collection specifically so it could be read by Moses Jackson, one of Houseman’s college roommates and the object of his life-long, probably unrequited love, who, by this time, lay terminally ill in Canada. Jackson was heterosexual and did not reciprocate Housman’s feelings. Housman obtained a first in classical Moderations in 1879, but his dedication to textual analysis, particularly with Propertius, led him to neglect ancient history and philosophy, which formed part of the Greats curriculum. Accordingly, he failed to obtain a degree. Some scholars attribute Housman’s unexpected failure in his final exams directly to his rejection by Jackson. Most biographers suggest that there are more obvious reasons. Housman was indifferent to philosophy, overconfident in his preternatural gifts, felt contempt for inexact learning, and enjoyed idling away his time with Jackson. He may also have been distracted by news of his father’s desperate illness. The failure left him with a deep sense of humiliation, and a determination to vindicate his genius.
Housman is a poet who often seems to be on the verge of saying the conventional poetic thing, and then, in a flash, turns it in a new direction. It may simply be the matter of an unexpected phrase or even a single word. A less original poet would have chosen “nearing” rather than “nighing” for the first-line end-verb. This is not a choice decided by the need for a rhyme, because the “a” line in the poem never rhymes. “Nighing” is a curious archaism: it’s not even a particularly melodious word, but perhaps the fact that it rhymes with another present participle that the poem resists, “sighing”, underlies its haunting effect. Finally, the verb reappears in a different tense. This time, “nighs” meets with its natural word-mate, “sighs”. It’s one small example of an enormous technical skill in the shaping and integration of individual units and whole poem. But this skill is un-showy. It serves something that, for Housman, was all-important to a poem: its emotion.
While concerned with the melancholy closure of ageing, the poem conveys in parenthesis the limitlessness of adolescent aspiration. The narrative slows luxuriantly in stanza five, and pauses on the easy confidence of “the air of other summers”. But then, all at once, it accelerates. Those awaited summers have arrived, and evaporated, remaining somehow unlived: “They came, and went, and are not …” At this point it’s absolutely clear that Housman is not writing in the comfortable afterglow of nostalgia. He is writing about a dark absence of fulfilment, now irredeemably faced in the light of “the only end of age” – to quote a poet who learned much from him, and seems to have been temperamentally similar, Philip Larkin.
Housman was a great classical scholar, and his intimacy with Latin, in particular, dictates the shape of his poetry. He makes our cumbersome language seem graceful, flexible and swift. His enduring popular reputation over the years is partly because of his ability to express emotions of a certain universally appealing kind (The Shropshire Lad has been in print continuously since 1896) but also testifies to a remarkable style, both epigrammatic and musical, which produces lyric poems that are simple to remember – and simply memorable.
Joe
