MR HOUSMAN'S LAST POEMS
Last Poems. By A. E. Housman. 12mo. 79 pages. Henry Holt and Company. $1.50.
LAYING down this little volume, as bitter as it is wistful and as gentle and strong to break futile things as a man's strength on a twig, one muses back to its predecessor of nearly thirty years ago. How A Shropshire Lad sang out honestly from gallows' heights, how it gave sadness and the beauty of the countryside a new hardness, and how, beside its clear, silver, inexorable voice all the organ music of the aesthetes quickly hushed into dead velvet—all this we remember. Last Poems speaks with a slightly new accent, while telling of the same spiritual country. The former volume drew exact lines on the land and noted carefully the passionate steps of puppets, each on his given line, each to his useless point. In Last Poems there is less drama, less interested amusement in the process, a more explicit concern with the journey's end. Where A Shropshire Lad was athletically grim and waved its pessimistic formula with a blitheness that was not all mockery, the later poems reflect and mutter and sigh. 'Tis the same tale, but there's a different telling on't. And so, while our memory of the more significant book is as of a clear view in the cool, green morning, we come out of its successor's pages with eyes half-closed and with a dreaminess of sunset.
The contrast finds illustration within the covers of the book itself, for some of it is pure Shropshire Lad, notably Eight O'clock:
"He stood, and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.
Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck."
