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corners the remnants of great cellars. And he may have had the occasional fling there, life not quite the sexual Sahara his poems suggest. One should not be surprised if he didn’t sometimes grow weary of his thralldom to what was now just a memory. The inner life has its routines and they can be every bit as tedious and irksome as those of the outer life. The grave began to seem a release from love as much as from life.

Crossing alone
    (
from
More Poems)
    Crossing alone the nighted ferry
    With the one coin for fee,
    Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
    Count you to find? Not me.
    The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,
    The true, sick-hearted slave,
    Expect him not in the just city
    And free land of the grave.

    The next poem is Housman at his very best: clear-eyed, unsentimental, having no truck with God or conventional morality and, in a poem that is full of echoes of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, having no patience with either.

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
    (
from
Last Poems)
    These, in the day when heaven was falling,
    The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
    Followed their mercenary calling
    And took their wages and are dead.
    Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
    They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
    What God abandoned, these defended,
    And saved the sum of things for pay.

    There are in all of us the remnants of another morality, a persistent rival to Christian and conventional ethics, in which honour, loyalty and pride outweigh modesty and self-denial. It’s the morality that prevails in gangster movies and in the western, and the point of Housman’s poem is immediately familiar if we set it in the American West and substitute for the mercenaries the reluctant gunslinger and the town lecher. Despised by the respectable (but cowardly) churchgoing homesteaders, these two social outcasts get together with the drunken doctor and shoot it out with the cattle gang who are holding the town to ransom. It is morality far from its official haunts, an ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’ but also
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
.
    While Housman’s poems are autobiographical, his landscapes are the landscapes of the heart. Although the ‘blue remembered hills’ of the next poem can be identified with the Malverns, they are symbols of a lost time rather than a lost place.

Into my heart an air that kills
    (
from
A Shropshire Lad)
    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.

    Once there had been another Housman: good at parody and light verse; even fun, as Lewis Carroll had been fun. Occasionally this surfaces, if rather mordantly, in the poems. In ‘Is my team ploughing’, Housman has a sour joke at the expense of the departed lover.

Is my team ploughing
    (
from
A Shropshire Lad)
    â€˜Is my team ploughing,
    That I was used to drive
    And hear the harness jingle
    When I was man alive?’
    Ay, the horses trample,
    The harness jingles now;
    No change though you lie under
    The land you used to plough.
    â€˜Is football playing
    Along the river shore,
    With lads to chase the leather,
    Now I stand up no more?’
    Ay, the ball is flying,
    The lads play heart and soul;
    The goal stands up, the keeper
    Stands up to keep the goal.
    â€˜Is my girl happy,
    That I thought hard to leave,
    And has she tired of weeping
    As she lies down at eve?’
    Ay, she lies down lightly,
    She lies not down to weep:
    Your girl is well contented.
    Be still, my lad, and sleep.
    â€˜Is my friend hearty,
    Now I am thin and pine,
    And has he found to sleep in
    A better bed than mine?’
    Yes, lad, I lie easy,
    I lie as lads would choose;
    I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,
    Never ask me whose.

    If you don’t conform in one thing, you must conform in all the