ninme

8 Responses to “Tuesday Night Verse”

1. Rueful Red Says:
   September 5th, 2007 at 2:45 am

   Why Housman?

   There’s a verse of his that I’m reminded of when I’m on the train to London and I see the spire of the parish church of my village in the far distance. Apart from my parents’ grave there’s very little reason for me ever to return there.

   Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?

   That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.

2. ninme Says:
   September 5th, 2007 at 8:10 am

   That sounds appropriate.

   The last Morse was named for that poem, and Morse recites that towards the beginning, in a bit of, ah, heavy forshadowing, perhaps? Anyway, I wanted to remember it.

3. Rueful Red Says:
   September 5th, 2007 at 8:16 am

   Actually, I spent most of my youth working quite hard to get away from the place. Content was a bit thin on the ground. Wouldn’t take it too much to heart. Bloke who wrote Morse went to my college.

   Hugh Kingsmill’s famous parody of Housman:

   What still alive at twenty-two, A clean, upstanding chap like you? Sure, if your throat is hard to slit, Slit your girl’s, and swing for it.

   Like enough, you won’t be glad When they come to hang you, lad: But bacon’s not the only thing That’s cured by hanging from a string.

4. Rueful Red Says:
   September 5th, 2007 at 9:15 am

   Auden on Housman:

   No-one, not even Cambridge, was to blame. Blame, if you like, the human situation. Heart-injured in north London he became The Latin scholar of his generation. Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust, Kept tears, like dirty postcards in a drawer. Food was his public love, his private lust Something to do with violence and the poor. In savage footnotes on unjust editions He timidly attacked the life he led And put the money of his feelings on The uncritical relations of the dead; Where only geographical divisions separate The coarse, hanged soldier from the don.

   Not one of Auden’s best. I don’t nowadays think Auden anywhere near as good as I did when I first read him, but that poem just fell apart even as I typed it out. Poor old Wystan, though he did set out to be over-rated after all.

5. Rueful Red Says:
   September 6th, 2007 at 8:18 am

   “geographical divisions separate”

   should be

   “geographical divisions parted”

   Tin ear is a sign of early-onset…..

6. ninme Says:
   September 6th, 2007 at 9:13 am

   You haven’t gone off Auden, have you?

   It sounds like Houseman wrote poetry like a girl. When he’d go all moody and depressed he’d start writing, making everyone think he was obsessed with death. But then one reads that he was gay, so that might be why.

7. Rueful Red Says:
   September 7th, 2007 at 1:54 am

   He was very gay indeed. None gayer. A bit overwrought, most of the time.

   Auden’s somehow not as good as I remember him as being. Still better than lots of others, though.

8. ninme Says:
   September 7th, 2007 at 11:33 am

   This sounds like your Auden love-affair is a recent thing. I was under the impression it was a deep and abiding relationship dating back decades.

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