324
PARTISAN REVIEW
right that it produces in the listener the physical effect that was his own
touchstone for poetry: the skin bristles, the blood runs cold in the vein.
There is little that is new in this collection. Here are the lyrics of
A Shropshire
Lad;
the contents of the
Last Poems,
so-called because they
were the last the poet himself saw through the press; the verses that, after
Alfred Housman's death, his brother was expressly "permitted but not
enjoined" to select for publication from his notebooks, together with three
translations, from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, respectively. His
literary executor has added five lyrics to those included in his memoir on
the poet but omitted from
More Poems.
These five are, with one exception,
not of outstanding interest. The exception is the final lyric, which, unfor–
tunately, is not listed in the Chronology of Poems which follows the care–
ful Note on the Text.
If
the greater part of his work was composed, as
seems probable, about the time of those which bear dates, then Housman's
most prolific period was 1895, with brief spurts of activity in 1900, 1905,
and 1922, and almost nothing produced in the interv.als. The last dated
piece was that written in 192'5 for his own funeral. Housman died on
April 30, 1936, precisely two years and nine months before Barcelona fell.
Yet this lyric, "The Olive," one of the few which bears a title, might well
have been called Elegy for Spain:
The olive in its orchard
Should now be rooted sure,
To cast abroad its branches
And flourish and endure.
Aloft amid
!!he
trenches
Its dressers dug and died;
The olive in its orchard
Should prosper and abide.
Close should the fruit be clustered
And light the leaf should wave,
So deep the root is planted
In the corrupting grave.
History has given this lyric an adventitious significance. Like the greater
part of his work, however, it has a universal validity.
His themes are the permanent themes: unhappy love, natural beauty,
death, the triumph of time. He is capable of hot resentment: witness such
a piece as the nameless one beginning:
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefor is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of
his
hair.
