A.E. Housman: life, works, and literary legacy

Ae Housman

THE LIFE of a.E. HOUSMAN:

Shot? So Quick, So Clean an Ending?

After a close reading of a.E. Housman's Shot? So Quick, So Clean an Ending?, first published in 1896 in the famous collection known as the Shropshire Lad, one can immediately sense that Housman has inserted a number of references to his own life as a poet and classical scholar. Generally, the poems contained in the Shropshire Lad relate the experiences of Terrence Hearsay, an exile in the sprawling city of London "from his native county," being Shropshire, and like Shot? So Quick, these poems are "very personal (and) nostalgic... with many of Housman's own feelings and emotions contained within them." Also, Shot? So Quick symbolizes Housman's "idealized conception of the county and county life" while stressing "an awareness of some of the harsher realities of life" ("A.E. Housman," Internet).

According to William Stanley Braithwaite, writing in the Introduction to the Shropshire Lad, this poem provides the impression that Housman was copying any number of Greek poems from ancient times, due to the reader sensing "a spiritual waging of miraculous forces... The singularly Grecian quality of a clean and fragrant mental and emotional temper" with themes of "ruin and defeat, or some great tragic crisis of spirit" (Introduction," Internet).

In the first verse of the poem, the character/narrator Terrence Hearsay, quite obviously Housman himself, declares that county Shropshire is "no country for old men" because of the presence of "The young/in one another's arms," a reference to young lovers or couples. The pessimism in these lines may be related to the fact that Housman's mother died on his 12th birthday and as a student at Oxford University, "he was further oppressed by his dawning realization of homosexual desires" ("A.E. Housman Biography," Internet). Certainly, Housman in 1896 Victorian England could not have easily gotten away with mentioning that some of the young people "In one another's arms" were gay. The third line, "Those dying generations -- at their song," may also be a reference to Housman's homosexuality, as well as the seventh line, "Caught in that sensual music."

In the third verse, the narrator pleads for the age-old sages of ancient times to become "the singing masters of my soul" and to "Consume my heart away; sick with desire/and fastened to a dying animal." These lines are a clear reference to how Housman felt about his homosexual lifestyle, for after his appointment in 1892 as professor of Latin at University College in London, Housman became "convinced that he must live without love" which drove him to become "increasingly reclusive" as a Latin scholar and poet ("A.E. Housman Biography," Internet). Also, Housman makes it quite evident that without love (in this case, the love of another man), his physical self is nothing less than a "dying animal" with a heart consumed by unrequited love and sexual desire. Also, Housman relates that the narrator "knows not what it is," a reference to himself as a gay man who only wishes to be gathered into "the artifice of eternity," with "artifice" symbolizing his desire to escape reality and hid within the confines of eternity.