This is as tart and unwinking as you will, with all of its philosophy carefully held down in the implications. There are no remarks, there is no squeal. Its futility is not a meditated thing, rather fate's impertinence thrust into the impatience and the lust of life, for of the hours we are told that he "counted them and cursed his luck." They are still worth the counting. Futility has not yet sunk into the heart of man. Elsewhere we are told:
"Could man be drunk forever
With liquor, love, or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down of nights.
But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts."
Explicit futility, a nicely cherished disgust that the poet has made over into a pessimism too sweet to smart. Such poems as this make of A Shropshire Lad a sort of protesting hillock on the smooth, verdant plain of Victorian-Georgian poesy. The "continuous excitement" of 1895 that Mr Housman speaks of in his preface had lifted him safely above the plain. He walks the plain now, not in the dead-earnest fashion of a real Victorian-Georgian, to be sure, rather with a foreign grace, with a reserve which somehow fails to realize the company he is in. We even find stratified poems, poems in which an honest workmanship of any perfectly honest squire ("Oh, to the bed of ocean, To Africk and to Ind") supports (or undermines) another layer ("And the dead call the dying And finger at the doors").
A Shropshire Lad had in much of its imagery something cold, sharp, precipitated, something of the momentaneous power that we attribute to an unexpected rustle in dead leaves. There is less of this quality in Last Poems, but it is present. The first poem is full of it:
"The sun is down and drinks away
From air and land the lees of day,"
