Lines to live by
Jun. 28th, 2015 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceThe troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
These may be my favourite four lines in all of Housman. The anthems for doomed youth are too susceptible of parody to take quite seriously (What, still alive at twenty-two, a fine upstanding lad like you?), and the anxious pastorals are just a little too conservative for me; but sometimes his poetry displays the same relentless determination as his scholarship, a ruthlessness with the human condition that is itself of the human condition, and then he can be magnificent. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale: I'd wear that on a T-shirt.
(In parenthesis: I wonder who it was who wrote the inevitable doctoral thesis on the influence of ale on successive generations of academic literary England? You can track it forward from Housman through Tolkien and Lewis; and I am sure backward from Housman too, though there you are outside my province. But I am utterly determined that the thing shall have been done.)
(And while we're off the subject: I was musing on the quatrain per se, and wondered if an equivalent three-line stanza could be called a terrain. And indeed it cannot, because it's called a tercet instead, but that didn't stop me thinking about it, because the whole of the Lawrence-on-Mars story is about the influence of language on landscape, or possibly vice versa; and I did once have a splendidly stoned conversation with my best friend about the influence of change-ringing on the English landscape, as the sound of the bells rolled thunderously down the canal and we may even have been in Shropshire at the time; and really all of literature, as all of life, it's all about the terrain. Which brings us neatly and inevitably back to Housman, so. Not off the subject at all, actually.)
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
These may be my favourite four lines in all of Housman. The anthems for doomed youth are too susceptible of parody to take quite seriously (What, still alive at twenty-two, a fine upstanding lad like you?), and the anxious pastorals are just a little too conservative for me; but sometimes his poetry displays the same relentless determination as his scholarship, a ruthlessness with the human condition that is itself of the human condition, and then he can be magnificent. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale: I'd wear that on a T-shirt.
(In parenthesis: I wonder who it was who wrote the inevitable doctoral thesis on the influence of ale on successive generations of academic literary England? You can track it forward from Housman through Tolkien and Lewis; and I am sure backward from Housman too, though there you are outside my province. But I am utterly determined that the thing shall have been done.)
(And while we're off the subject: I was musing on the quatrain per se, and wondered if an equivalent three-line stanza could be called a terrain. And indeed it cannot, because it's called a tercet instead, but that didn't stop me thinking about it, because the whole of the Lawrence-on-Mars story is about the influence of language on landscape, or possibly vice versa; and I did once have a splendidly stoned conversation with my best friend about the influence of change-ringing on the English landscape, as the sound of the bells rolled thunderously down the canal and we may even have been in Shropshire at the time; and really all of literature, as all of life, it's all about the terrain. Which brings us neatly and inevitably back to Housman, so. Not off the subject at all, actually.)