by A E Housman
Thine heart is cruel, and never
Came pity anigh unto thee.
Thee too, O King, hath she taken
And bound in her tenfold chain;
Yet faint not, neither complain:
The dead thou wilt not awaken
For all thy weeping again.
They perish, whom gods begot;
The night releaseth them not.
Beloved was she that died
And dear shall ever abide,
For this was the queen among women,
Admetus, that lay by thy side.
Not as the multitude lowly
Asleep in their sepulchres,
Not as their grave be hers,
But like as the gods held holy,
The worship of wayfarers.
Yea, all that travel the way
Far off shall see it and say,
Lo, erst for her lord she died,
To-day she sitteth enskied;
Hail, lady, be gracious to usward; that alway her honour abide.
Oedipus at Colonus, from Sophocles
Lines 1211–48
What man is he that yearneth
For length unmeasured of days?
Folly mine eye discerneth
Encompassing all his ways.
For years over-running the measure
Shall change thee in evil wise:
Grief draweth nigh thee; and pleasure,
Behold, it is hid from thine eyes.
This to their wage have they
Which overlive their day.
And He that looseth from labour
Doth one with other befriend,
Whom bride nor bridesmen attend,
Song, nor sound of the tabor,
Death, that maketh an end.
Thy portion esteem I highest,
Who wast not ever begot;
Thine next, being born who diest
And straightway again art not.
With follies light as the feather
Doth Youth to man befall;
Then evils gather together,
There wants not one of them all –
Wrath, envy, discord, strife,
The sword that seeketh life.
And sealing the sum of trouble
Doth tottering Age draw nigh,
Whom friends and kinsfolk fly,
Age, upon whom redouble
All sorrows under the sky.
This man, as me, even so,
Have the evil days overtaken;
And like as a cape sea-shaken
With tempest at earth’s last verges
And shock of all winds that blow,
His head the seas of woe,
The thunders of awful surges
Ruining overflow;
Blown from the fall of even,
Blown from the dayspring forth,
Blown from the noon in heaven,
Blown from night and the North.
Seven Against Thebes, from Aeschylus
Lines 848–60
Now do our eyes behold
The tidings which were told:
Twin fallen kings, twin perished hopes to mourn,
The slayer, the slain,
The entangled doom forlorn
And ruinous end of twain.
Say, is not sorrow, is not sorrow’s sum
On home and hearthstone come?
O waft with sighs the sail from shore,
O smite the bosom, cadencing the oar
That rows beyond the rueful stream for aye
To the far strand,
The ship of souls, the dark,
The unreturning bark
Whereon light never falls nor foot of Day,
Ev’n to the bourne of all, to the unbeholden land.
COMIC VERSE
Although Housman is often associated with pessimistic themes in his poetry, having built up an image of himself as a scholarly recluse, fond of acrimonious disputes of classical studies in later years, the range of verses in this collection reveal the lighter side of the poet’s character. Housman also clearly relished a joke and from a young age he was very found of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the art of nonsense poetry. In later years he earned a reputation as a great after dinner speaker and a ready wit, with his letters and epigrams including many examples of his skilful ability in this area. Therefore, it should not come as such a surprise that Housman was an accomplished writer of nonsense poetry and comic verse as demonstrated in the following collection.
CONTENTS
The Use And Abuse Of Toads
The shades of night were falling fast
The Crocodile
I knew a Cappadocian
Amelia mixed some mustard
What, little Arthur, do you know
It is a fearful thing to be
The Amphisbæna
The Elephant
When Adam day by day
The Cat
Infant Innocence
There is Hallelujah Hannah
Hallelujah!
Elegant Edith and Modest Minnie
O have you caught the tiger?
As I was walking slowly
Purple William
The African Lion
Now all day the horned herds
Aunts and Nieces
The Latin author Lucan
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Fragment of an English Opera
Whit Monday, 1903
The oyster is found in the ocean
At the door of my own little hovel
The Bear or The Empty Perambulator or The Pathos of Ignorance
Of old the little Busy Bee
Oft when the night is chilly
Inhuman Henry
The Unicorn is not a Goose
Fragment of a Greek Tragedy
Housman, 1926
The Use And Abuse Of Toads
As into the garden Elizabeth ran
Pursued by the just indignation of Ann,
She trod on an object that lay in her road,
She trod on an object that looked like a toad.
It looked like a toad, and it looked so because
A toad was the actual object it was;
And after supporting Elizabeth’s tread
It looked like a toad that was visibly dead.
Elizabeth, leaving her footprint behind,
Continued her flight on the wings of the wind,
And Ann in her anger was heard to arrive
At the toad that was not any longer alive.
She was heard to arrive, for the firmament rang
With the sound of a scream and the noise of a bang,
As her breath on the breezes she broadly bestowed
And fainted away on Elizabeth’s toad.
Elizabeth, saved by the sole of her boot,
Escaped her insensible sister’s pursuit;
And if ever hereafter she irritates Ann,
She will tread on a toad if she possibly can.
The shades of night were falling fast
The shades of night were falling fast,
And the rain was falling faster,
When through an Alpine village passed
An Alpine village pastor:
A youth who bore mid snow and ice
A bird that wouldn’t chirrup,
And a banner with the strange device -
“Mrs Winslow’s soothing syrup.”
“Beware the pass,” the old man said,
“My bold, my desperate fellah;
Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
And you’ll want your umberella;
And the roaring torrent is deep and wide -
You may hear how loud it washes.”
But still that clarion voice replied:
“I’ve got my old goloshes.”
“Oh, stay,” the maiden said, “and rest
(For the wind blows from the nor’ward)
Thy weary head upon my breast -
And please don’t think I’m forward.”
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
And he gladly would have tarried;
But still he answered with a sigh:
“Unhappily I’m married.”
The Crocodile
OR PUBLIC DECENCY
Though some at my aversion smile,
I cannot love the crocodile.
Its conduct does not seem to me
Consistent with sincerity.
Where Nile, with beneficial flood,
Improves the desert sand to mud,
The infant child, its banks upon,
Will run about with nothing on.
The London County Council not
Being adjacent to the spot,
This is the consequence. Meanwhile,
What is that object in the Nile
Which swallows water, chokes and spits?
It is the crocodile in fits.
“Oh infant! oh my country’s shame!
Suppose a European came!
Picture his feelings, on his pure
Personally conducted tour!
The British Peer’s averted look,
The mantling blush of Messrs. Cook!
Come, awful infant, come and be
Dressed, if in nothing else, in me.”
Then disappears into the Nile
The infant, clad in crocodile,
And meekly yields his youthful breath
To darkness, decency, and death.
His mother, in the local dells,
Deplores him with Egyptian yells:
Her hieroglyphic howls are vain,
Nor will the lost return again.
The crocodile itself no less
Displays, but does not feel, distress,
And with its tears augments the Nile;
The false, amphibious crocodile.
“Is it that winds Etesian blow,
Or melts on Ethiop hills the snow?”
So, midst the inundated scene,
Inquire the floating fellaheen.
From Cairo’s ramparts gazing far
The mild Khedive and stern Sirdar
Say, as they scan the watery plain,
“There goes that crocodile again.”
The copious tribute of its lids
Submerges half the pyramids,
And over all the Sphinx it flows,
Except her non-existent nose.
I knew a Cappadocian
I knew a Cappadocian
Who fell in the Ocean:
His mother came and took him out
With tokens of emotion.
She also had a daughter
Who fell into the Water:
At any rate she would have fallen
If someone hadn’t caught her.
The second son went frantic
And fell in the Atlantic:
His parent reached the spot too late
To check her offspring’s antic.
Her grief was then terrific:
She fell in the Pacific,
Exclaiming with her latest breath
“I have been too prolific.”
Amelia mixed some mustard
Amelia mixed some mustard,
She mixed it strong and thick;
She put it in the custard
And made her mother sick.
And showing satisfaction
By many a loud huzza,
“Observe,” said she “the action
of mustard on mamma.”
What, little Arthur, do you know
What, little Arthur, do you know
Of Marcus Tullius Cicero?
He wrote about a nasty brute,
A Frenchman called De Senectute.
Who, Arthur, was Horatius Flaccus?
He was a votary of Bacchus.
And who was Festus Avienus?
He was a votary of Venus.
Of whom was Decius Mus a votary?
He was a member of a coterie.
What was the date of Volcacius Sedigitus?
What might the date of that good man be?
We will not allow such a detail to fidget us:
Put him B.C. if he wasn’t A.D.
The annals of Rome are sufficiently spacious
For even Voldigitus Thingamycacius.
It is a fearful thing to be
It is a fearful thing to be
The Pope.
That cross will not be laid on me,
I hope.
A righteous God would not permit
It.
The Pope himself must often say,
After the labours of the day,
“It is a fearful thing to be
Me”.
The Amphisbæna
“In the back back garden Thomasina
Did you recently vociferate a squeal?”
“Oh! I trod upon an amphisbæna,
And it bit me on the toe and on the heel.
Yes it bit me (do you know)
With its tail upon the toe,
While it bit me with its head upon the heel.”
“How excessively distracting and confusing,
Pray what, Thomasina, did you do?”
“Oh! I took the garden scissors I was using
And I snipped it irretrievably in two.
And it split with such a scrunch
That I shall not want my lunch;
And if you had heard the noise no more would you.”
“And where, Thomasina, are the sections
Of the foe that you courageously suppressed?”
“Oh! they ran away in opposite directions,
And they vanished in the east and in the west.
And the way they made me squint
It would move a heart of flint.
And I think that I will go upstairs and rest.”
The Elephant
OR THE FORCE OF HABIT
A tail behind, a trunk in front,
Complete the usual elephant.
The tail in front, the trunk behind,
Is what you very seldom find;
If you for specimens should hunt
With trunks behind and tails in front,
That hunt would occupy you long;
The force of habit is so strong.
When Adam day by day
When Adam day by day
Woke up in Paradise,
He always used to say
“Oh, this is very nice.”
But Eve from scenes of bliss
Transported him for life.
The more I think of this
The more I beat my wife.
The Cat
OR IRRELEVANT INFORMATION
The Cat, in hopes of catching larks,
Leaps high into the air;
To dive into the sea for sharks
She does not seem to care;
The Cat was one of Noah’s Ark’s
Inhabitants; she never barks;
Her back is said to give out sparks
In thunderstorms; - but these remarks
Are neither here nor there.
Infant Innocence
The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;
He has devoured the infant child.
The infant child is not aware
He has been eaten by the bear.
There is Hallelujah Hannah
There is Hallelujah Hannah
Walking backwards down the lane,
And I hear the loud Hosanna
Of regenerated Jane;
And Lieutenant Isabella
In the centre of them comes,
Dealing blows with her umbrella
On the trumpets and the drums.
Hallelujah!
“Hallelujah!” was the only observation
That escaped Lieutenant Mary Jane,
When she tumbled off the platform in the station,
And was cut in little pieces by the train.
Mary Jane, the train is throug
h yer:
Hallelujah, Hallelujah!
We will gather up the fragments that remain.
Elegant Edith and Modest Minnie
Elegant Edith and Modest Minnie
A-walking along by the side of a spinney.
Modest Minnie in front proceedeth,
And close behind trots elegant Edith.
When out of the spinney a midge arises
And taketh and biteth the two Miss Wises.
“Oh something has just come out of the spinney
And taken and bitten me, modest Minnie.”
“O modest Minnie, by what are we bitten?
A tortoiseshell cat or a tabby kitten?
What animal is it whose venom rankles
In both our modest and elegant ankles?
A mouse, or a midge that lives in the spinney
Or cow or a crocodile, modest Minnie?”
“Oh elegant Edith, it does not matter;
Carbolic will do us more good than chatter.
Whatever it is, it’s a nasty creature
Whose conduct has no redeeming feature.
For of all acts it is quite the oddest
To bite the elegant and the modest.”
Here ends the tale of the two Miss Wises,
It might be true if it wasn’t lieses.
O have you caught the tiger?
O have you caught the tiger?
And can you hold him tight?
And what immortal hand or eye
Could frame his fearful symmetry?
And does he try to bite?
