A.E. Housman Poetry Is Above

a.E. Housman

Poetry is above all a form of personal expression, and it is clear that the poet draws on his or her own experience as a source. Finding the links between the observations and expressions of a poet may not always be that easy, though a general tenor can be discerned that links to the poet's life. a.E. Housman became an important English poet in the early part of the twentieth century and expressed a degree of pessimism linked by many critics to a Romantic spirit but also reflecting aspects of the poet's life. The poem "Shot? So Quick, so Clean an Ending?" serves as one example of this pessimistic spirit and a reflection of elements from the life of the poet.

Housman experienced numerous difficulties in his life that would shape the way he viewed the world. His mother died when he was twelve, a blow that certainly contributed to his pessimism in life. He discovered he was a homosexual while he was at Oxford, and when his love for another student was rebuffed, he was devastated. He was a scholar of some ability, but he failed his final examination at Oxford. Still, he overcame this difficulty and became a professor of Latin at University College in London. He may have become convinced that he had to live without love and so became more and more reclusive, turning more to his notebooks and to the poems he wrote. He saw himself as a Latinist and avoided the literary world that celebrated his poetry. After 1911, he was professor of Latin at Cambridge and remained there almost until his death. During this time, he worked on his major scholarly effort over a thirty-year period, an annotated edition of Manilius, even though the latter wrote poetry he did not like ("A.E. Housman Biography" paras. 1-5).

The poem "Shot? So Quick, so Clean an Ending?" was written by Housman after he read about the suicide of a homosexual cadet (Reed para. 6), clearly evoking his concerns about his own homosexuality and how he reacted to it when he was younger. The poem is found in the volume a Shropshire Lad. Reed notes how Housman preferred that readers know nothing of him but only reacted to the words on the page, and his mask of being a Cambridge don of colorless propriety is shown by some biographers to be false, for the poet was actually "a homosexual wrestling with his 'curse,' an atheist, gourmet, lover of nonsense verse and devoted companion to the few people he could tolerate" (Reed para. 3).

The opening stanza of the poem suggests a degree of despair on the part of the poet as well as a sense of resentment that society makes this idea necessary. Housman writes,

Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?

Oh that was right, lad, that was brave:

Yours was not an ill for mending,

Twas best to take it to the grave (1-4).

The "ill for mending" is his homosexuality, a factor shared by the poet, who also knows that society sees this as an ill and that it is not something that can be "repaired." The apparent admiration the poet expresses for the suicide might be seen as based on thoughts he may have himself had about suicide when he discovered his homosexuality and when that was rebuffed by his chosen target. Maude H. Hawkins writes that "Housman had been almost overwhelmingly obsessed with the desire to kill himself, but was saved from it by native courage and ambition" (164). Here, the poet writes about the process as if he had been through it and failed by drawing back, while he admires this young man who followed through:

Oh you had forethought, you could reason,

And saw your road and where it led,

And early wise and brave in season

Put the pistol to your head (5-8).

The language in this poem is the sort of simple and direct language for which Housman was noted.

Housman speculates about what later life would have been like for the cadet if he had not killed himself, and in so doing suggests what his own life has been like. He says that the cadet might later have done the same thing "After long disgrace and scorn" (10). He also hints at his own despair when he refers to the cadet as "The soul that should not have been born" (12). Housman also indicates that being homosexual in a society that despises the homosexual is a fate worse than death, a fate that he himself has lived. He says that the cadet has rightly seen what his future would be like and has chosen the better path: