"The long cloud and the single pine
Sentinel the ending line,"
"Oh lad, I fear that yon's the sea
Where they fished for you and me."
These strangenesses are not awkward, not sought. They have more suddenness than ingenuity; they suggest omens, possibly, rather than pictures. Even the slightly euphuistic passages ring true, such as:
"And let not yet the swimmer leave
His clothes upon the sands of eve."
It is ungracious and pedagogical to contrast, to mark off epochs. Yet a brief glance at our current exasperation, the better to fix Mr Housman for our envy, a cordial good-bye to what is no longer strictly ours, and a vain question will not be thought too heavy a load of analysis. For, having laid down the Last Poems and mused of the lad, we find ourselves automatically closing the little book—and the manner of its closing is a symbol—not curtly, with a businesslike indifference, nor too lingeringly, with many browsings back and forth between the reluctantly closing covers, but slowly and decisively. We should like to feel ourselves more excitedly in the midst of Mr Housman's work, but it will not go. A truth that we nearly hate whispers to us that there is no use pretending, that these lines lilt too doggedly and too sweetly to fall in quite with our more exigent, half-undiscovered harmonies, that many of the magic turns catch us cruelly absent-minded. And, most disappointing of all, for we are a little disappointed, and vexed at being so, we cannot seem to pool Mr Housman's pessimism with our own. We seem to feel that our zero does not equate with his, that each has a different mathematical "sense" or tendency.
We discover, as we probe into our puzzling disaccord, that we already love the Shropshire lad as we love our Coleridge and our Blake and begin to divine that we were a little hasty in dating our modern drift from Mr Housman's first volume. Its flare and its protest were a psychological, a temperamental, phenomenon, not a strictly cultural one. Its disillusionment was rooted in personality,
