Poetry and Sadness

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a light-foot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The light-foot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Somewhere I acquired the belief that the truest poetry is the most sad – that it is what Milton called his elegy ‘Lycidas’: a ‘melodious tear’. Shelley said: ‘Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought’. I agree with Shelley. In fact, I find it difficult to think any other way about poetry.

My mother used to read aloud Alfred Noyes’s ‘The Highwayman’. No doubt its tender, tragic atmosphere helped form my notion of poetry. The highwayman passionately farewells ‘the landlord’s black-eyed daughter’, Bess:

He rose upright in the stirrups. He scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair in the casement. His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
           (O, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the west.

Later ‘King George’s men’ shoot the highwayman dead when, suicidally, he returns to Bess.

With its inn, red-coats, and so on, this is a very English poem. But I’m struck by how natural ‘The Highwayman’ appeared to me in Melbourne’s southeastern suburbs in the 1970s. Perhaps it chimed with the vaguely ‘poetic’ pathos that often pervades adolescence.

The Melbourne of that time is rapidly becoming a period: turning into The Past, fragmenting into images and sensations – Sunday afternoon’s tedium; wandering for hours through quiet streets; smouldering autumn leaves in gutters. My father had an excellent voice, and on summer nights in our garden or on the verandah would drink a lot of beer, wine, or brandy, or anything else he could find, and recite poems and sing ‘Danny Boy’ and other songs. Sometimes his sister sang ‘The Linden Tree’. In the dark it was hard to see Dad – as if he were becoming invisible, being taken away on the powerful current of some black destructive river, and his voice and the tip of his cigarette were like signals from afar. ‘Danny Boy’ recalled his brother Jacky, killed in action in New Guinea. This brother haunted our house. At my grandmother’s, photos of he and Dad, both in uniform, made a miniature Shrine of Remembrance on top of the pianola.

‘But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,/ Now thou art gone, and never must return!’ Those lines from ‘Lycidas’, about a youth ‘dead ere his prime’, sum up my conception of poetry. Poetry and loss go together – people often mean by ‘poetic’ a feeling of gentle sadness. I at least can’t think of anything more poetic than the high, doomed eloquence of Richard II:

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth…
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings…

The key thing for Richard is not to do anything – it’s lovely instead to give oneself up to such sadness. Of course, his outpouring here strikes many as hysterical and self-indulgent. In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale ‘Olde fader Egeus’ strikes a graver note: ‘This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,/ And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro./ Deeth is an ende of every worldy soore’. That’s better, perhaps: weightier, more philosophic than Richard. But both characters utter the tragic wisdom which for me, like it or not, is poetry’s ‘essence’.

At first glance Wordsworth doesn’t seem to fit very well into my roll-call of poetic sad-sacks. He is so healthy-minded, in William James’s sense: believing in the essential goodness of things. (James compared healthy-mindedness with the outlook of the ‘sick soul’ in The Varieties of Religious Experience [1902].) Wordsworth is totally unneurotic. Like Montaigne or Nietzsche he sees nothing to regret in his life and is full of thanks for the blessings bestowed on him. But he is sensitive to pain and his happiness (as in the ‘Immortality’ ode) often boils down to fortitude in the face of loss, a will to find compensation: ‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more./…there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth./…We will grieve not, rather find/ Strength in what remains behind.’ Just as Shakespeare associates music with sadness (‘I am never merry when I hear sweet music’ – Jessica in The Merchant of Venice), Wordsworth couples poetry with it. In ‘The Solitary Reaper’ Wordsworth hears a farm girl’s simple song. He can’t discern its content, but it stays with him. He wonders whether it concerns ‘old, unhappy, far-off things’ or ‘Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be again’. In ‘Resolution and Independence’ he famously links the poetic career with catastrophe: ‘We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof come in the end despondency and madness’.

No matter how much my father had drunk, he never muffed a line when reciting Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven’. In many ways his life was unhappy. He was a part-time actor but his career never took off. He did a lot of radio drama in Melbourne in the forties and fifties and, later, got small parts in TV crime shows like Homicide and Division 4, as well as doing lots of TV ads that brought in plenty of ‘dough’, as he called it (Dad loved the lingo, dress, and manner of Hollywood tough-guys like Humphrey Bogart.) However, he never became the person he wanted to be: a fine, acclaimed actor. I’m not sure why he didn’t pursue heart and soul what he should have done – being an actor – or why he settled for a crushing, dull job he hated. But I do know things hadn’t turned out the way he wanted. He lost an adored brother and throughout his life struggled with alcohol. (He once did an ad for Fosters beer having only recently left a drying-out facility.) So I think that when Dad recited ‘The Raven’, the dramatic intensity with which he imbued Poe’s words about hopeless desire and sorrow came in part from his own disappointment:

…vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow – sorrow for the lost Lenore –
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore –
                                                      Nameless here for evermore.

Edmund Gosse said A.E. Housman (1859–1936) was the poet of ‘the unconquerable longing for what is gone for ever’. I didn’t read Housman until after leaving home, even though he was one of my mother’s favourite poets. But when I encountered him I found a melancholy I recognised at once. Orwell said Housman was an adolescent’s writer, so his poetry may simply have reminded me of being a teenager. But he is also an exceedingly sad poet – the saddest in English. He only wrote, he said, when ‘out of sorts’, which means he subscribed to what I’ll call the ‘Ivanov Theory of Poetic Creation’, after Chekhov’s despairing neurotic: ‘The only thing left for me’ says Ivanov – he shoots himself at the end of the play – ‘is to write poetry’. Housman’s topics, not least dead young soldiers, were familiar to me:

East and west on fields forgotten
  Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
  None that go return again.

One can escape the pain of loss through alcohol. But in Housman it’s as if death is the cure for life itself, which is by nature tragic. When his sister’s son was killed in Flanders in 1915, Housman sent her a poem depicting a soldier in his grave:

Oh dark is the chamber and lonely,
  And lights and companions depart;
But lief will he lose them and only
  Behold the desire of his heart.

And low is the roof, but it covers
  A sleeper content to repose;
And far from his friends and his lovers
  He lies with the sweetheart he chose.

In this poem ‘lads are in love with the grave’. The soldier’s ‘sweetheart’, ‘the desire of his heart’, is death itself, which is darkly seductive – notice the echo in ‘love’/‘grave’. Housman thought poetry should ‘harmonise the sadness of the universe’: see it as beautiful and deep rather than just repulsive, silly, or wrong. We can call this very well-known, morbid attitude Hamletism: we love Hamlet because he is a failure, and are bored by Fortinbras’s success. (Walt Whitman declared Hamlet unsuited to a democracy because it slackened the nerves and encouraged defeatism.)

Recently, in Death, Desire, and Loss in Western Culture (Penguin, 1998), Jonathan Dollimore argues that Western civilisation has made a fateful equation between profundity and melancholy. Dollimore notices the oddity of something we rather take for granted: that ‘the most revered of all Western aesthetic genres’ – tragedy – provides ‘metaphysical reassurance that…failure is ultimately inevitable’. His analysis recalls William James’s, who thought the sick soul identifies sadness with wisdom, supposing that ‘the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to our heart’. To this type ‘healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow’. Reading Dollimore makes you realise how much of its metaphysics the sick soul derives from the Bible and tragedy. (Years ago G. Wilson Knight condemned Hamlet as a ‘soul…sick to death’; Dollimore shows how the play – like Keats later – eroticises death as ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished’.)

Housman, too, is in love with ‘easeful death’. His most recent editor, Archie Burnett, has shown the presence in Housman’s poems of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and Job – the view of life that issues in the desire for death because ‘all is vanity and vexation of spirit’. The Chorus in Oedipus at Colonus expresses the same wish (I quote from Housman’s jaunty translation):

Thy portion esteem I highest,
          Who wast not ever begot;
Thine next, being born who diest
          And straightway again art not.

(Note the suppressed rhyme ‘rot’ in these terminations of Housman’s: we are begot, rot, are not.) Dollimore sees the Western (Christian) desire for ‘eternal life’ as a concealed longing for death: that is, for cessation of that very mutability which is life. That longing is central to Housman.

In a lecture, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’, Housman invoked the lyrical, sad Shakespeare of the songs as a touchstone for determining poetic merit. His own poems often allude to Cymbeline’s ‘Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun’:

Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,
          Nor the furious winter’s rages.

Thou thy worldly task hast done,
          Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,
          As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

According to Burnett, Housman thought this a peak of ‘lyrical achievement’. Certainly Shakespeare specialises in a line of quaint, picturesque sadness Housman liked. Writing in 1858, Walter Bagehot recognised a ‘constitutional though latent melancholy’ as Shakespeare’s ‘exceptional characteristic’: ‘all through his works’, he wrote, ‘you feel you are reading the popular author, the successful man; but through them all there is a certain tinge of musing sadness pervading, and, as it were, softening their gaiety’. Housman’s own effect of comely sadness owes something to Shakespeare. Think of Cordelia in King Lear –

                                              You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears
Were like a better way. Those happy smilets,
That play’d on her ripe lip, seem’d not to know
What guests were in her eyes, which parted thence,
As pearls from diamonds dropp’d. In brief,
Sorrow would be a rarity most beloved,
If all could so become it.

– or Leontes’s reconciliation with Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale: ‘their joy waded in tears’. Housman admired the sweet, ‘poetical’ pathos of the songs: ‘Come away, come away, death/ And in sad cypress let me be laid’; ‘Take, O take those lips away’; ‘Let us all ring fancy’s knell: / I’ll begin it – Ding, dong, bell./ Ding, dong, bell.’ There’s no such thing as the ‘essential Shakespeare’ – he is myriad-minded, as Coleridge said – but, like Housman, I find delicate pathos a Shakespearian signature:

                       She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i th’ bud
Feed on her damask cheek. She pin’d in thought;
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument;
Smiling at grief.

Viola’s speech gives Twelfth Night one element – exquisite melancholy – in its rich atmosphere. I take this melancholy to be identical to Housman’s melting sadness, though it must never be forgotten that there is a mordant strain in his verse as well (‘A lad that lives and has his will/ Is worth a dozen dead’ says a successful lover of his dead rival). What’s more, Housman sends up his own ‘moping melancholy’ at the end of A Shropshire Lad: ‘But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,/ It gives a chap the belly-ache’.

Because he writes so perfectly you’re disposed to give in to Housman’s serene lulling pathos. But I now think his poetry is the siren’s call. Indeed, his own example of ‘perfect’ poetry is Samuel Daniel’s ‘Ulysses and the Siren’, first published in 1605. The Siren urges Ulysses to cease striving:

Come, worthy Greek, Ulysses, come,
    Possess these shores with me:
The winds and seas are troublesome,
    And here we may be free.
Here may we sit and view their toil
    That travail in the deep,
And joy the day in mirth the while,
    And spend the night in sleep.

Compare Shropshire Lad VII – one of the most sinister poems ever written. Early one morning the speaker strides out whistling ‘to ploughing… / beside [his] team’. But a ‘blackbird in the coppice’, eyeing him,’replie[s]’ to his whistling:

Lie down, lie down, young yeoman;
    What use to rise and rise?
Rise man a thousand mornings
    Yet down at last he lies,
    And then the man is wise.

The ploughman sees the bird’s ‘yellow bill’ and angrily flings a stone at it: ‘Then the bird was still.’ But –

Then my soul within me
    Took up the blackbird’s strain,
And still beside the horses
    Along the dewy lane
    It sang the song again:

‘Lie down, lie down, young yeoman;
    The sun moves always west;
The road one treads to labour
    Will lead one home to rest,
    And that will be the best.’

Frightening it may be, but the poem is also extraordinarily self-conscious, commenting on Housman’s own Hamlet-like weariness of life. Like the ploughman, Housman’s poetry has internalised the blackbird’s wish for release from existence. In Shropshire Lad LXIII he declares his unfashionable poems are ‘flowers’ that go ‘unheeded’: their ‘hue was not the wear’. Nevertheless, ‘luckless lads will wear them/ When I am dead and gone.’ This is terrible – as if Housman is cursing his own readers.

Housman’s charming, song-like poems express a dreadful resignation:

And bound for the same bourn as I,
On every road I wandered by,
Trod beside me, close and dear,
The beautiful and death-struck year.

(Burnett notes the echo of Hamlet: ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveller returns’.) In Housman, death is ‘The Merry Guide’ and ‘the land to which I travel,/ The far dwelling…’ His ‘Athlete Dying Young’ is now ‘Townsman of a stiller town’. And the dead in his poems look funny and stiff as they ‘lie’ (his invariable word) under ground. Human existence is inescapably unfulfilling; death a welcome relief, a calm dark quiet house, with a ‘sill of shade’ and a ‘low lintel’.

Housman lets us look back and indulge our feeling for what has been lost. And this loss – ‘The happy highways where I went/ And cannot come again’, or ‘hearts of gold’ left behind – is always mixed with the quaint pretty Shakespearian melodiousness. Here is one of my very favourite poets – but I have come to be wary of him.

I’ll close with Montaigne, who refused to think melancholy deep:

No man is more free from this passion than I, for I neither love nor regard it: albeit the world hath undertaken, as it were upon covenant, to grace it with a particular favour. Therewith they adorne age, vertue, and conscience. O foolish and base ornament! The Italians have more properly with its name entitled malignitie: for, it is a qualitie ever hurtfull, ever sottish.

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Quotations from Housman are from the wonderful edition by Archie Burnett (Oxford, 1997).